Clustering-Triggered Emission Liquid Crystalline Polymer Bearing Cholesterol: Tunable Circularly Polarized...

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials with clustering-triggered emission (CTE) characteristic have gradually attracted attention for their unique photophysical properties. However, the majority of reported clusteroluminogens lack chirality and exhibit heterogeneity, making it challenging to achieve a well-defined helical structure necessary for efficient CPL with high dissymmetry factor (g_lum ). In this paper, chiral liquid crystals are constructed to obtain CTE-based CPL materials with high g_lum values. Side chain liquid crystal polymer PM6Chol bearing cholesterol clusteroluminogens are designed and synthesized. PM6Chol-coated film and PM6Chol thermal-treated film are also successfully prepared by different film-forming methods. Both the films inherit the CTE characteristic of cholesterol and show excitation wavelength-dependent luminescent behavior. However, the two polymer films exhibit different liquid crystal phase structures, with PM6Chol-coated film being a chiral bilayer smectic C phase and PM6Chol thermal-treated film being an achiral bilayer smectic A phase. Attributed to helical arrangement of cholesterol, PM6Chol-coated film emits efficient CPL with g_lum values up to 1.0 × 10^-1 . For PM6Chol thermal-treated film, no CPL signal is detected due to the absence of helical structure. However, it shows obvious room-temperature phosphorescence with 2.0 s afterglow and 23.9 ms lifetime.