Achieving high circularly polarized luminescence with push-pull helicenic systems: from rationalized design to...

While the development of chiral molecules displaying circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has received considerable attention, the corresponding CPL intensity, g _lum, hardly exceeds 10^-2 at the molecular level owing to the difficulty in optimizing the key parameters governing such a luminescence process. To address this challenge, we report here the synthesis and chiroptical properties of a new family of π-helical push-pull systems based on carbo[6]helicene, where the latter acts as either a chiral electron acceptor or a donor unit. This comprehensive experimental and theoretical investigation shows that the magnitude and relative orientation of the electric (μ_e ) and magnetic (μ _m ) dipole transition moments can be tuned efficiently with regard to the molecular chiroptical properties, which results in high g _lum values, i.e. up to 3-4 × 10^-2. Our investigations revealed that the optimized mutual orientation of the electric and magnetic dipoles in the excited state is a crucial parameter to achieve intense helicene-mediated exciton coupling, which is a major contributor to the obtained strong CPL. Finally, top-emission CP-OLEDs were fabricated through vapor deposition, which afforded a promising g _El of around 8 × 10^-3. These results bring about further molecular design guidelines to reach high CPL intensity and offer new insights into the development of innovative CP-OLED architectures.