Stimuli-Responsive Circularly Polarized Organic Ultralong Room Temperature Phosphorescence

Purely organic materials showing room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) and ultralong RTP (OURTP) have recently attracted much attention. However, it is challenging to integrate circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) into RTP/OURTP. Here, we show a strategy to realize CPL-active OURTP (CP-OURTP) by binding an achiral phosphor group directly to the chiral center of an ester chain. Engineering of this flexible chiral chain enables efficient chirality transfer to carbazole aggregates, resulting in strong CP-OURTP with a lifetime of over 0.6 s and dissymmetry factor of 2.3×10^-3 after the conformation regulation upon photo-activation. The realized CP-OURTP is thus stable at room temperature but can be deactivated quickly at 50 °C to CP-RTP with high CPL stability during the photo-activation/thermal-deactivation cycles. Based on this extraordinary photo/thermal-responsive and highly reversible CP-OURTP/RTP, a CPL-featured lifetime-encrypted combinational logic device has been successfully established.