Not by Serendipity: Rationally Designed Reversible Temperature-Responsive Circularly Polarized Luminescence Inversion...

Intelligent control over the handedness of circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is of special significance in smart optoelectronics, information storage, and data encryption; however, it still remains a great challenge to rationally design a CPL material that displays reversible handedness inversion without changing the system composition. Herein, we show this comes true by coupling the two scenarios of Harata-Kodaka's rule on the same supramolecular platform of crystalline microtubes self-assembled from surfactant-cyclodextrin host-guest complexes. Upon coassembling a linear dye with its electronic transition dipole moment outside of the cavity of β-CyD, the chirality transfer from the induced chirality of SDS in the SDS@2β-CyD microtubes to the dye generates left-handed CPL at room temperature. Upon elevating temperature, the dye forms inclusion complex with β-CyD, so that right-handed CPL is induced because the polar group of the dye is outside of the cavity of β-CyD. This process is completely reversible. We envision that host-guest chemistry would be very promising in creating smart CPL inversion materials for a vast number of applications.