Binaphthalene-Assisted Axial Chirality in Porphyrins: Toward Solid-State Circularly Polarized Luminescence from...

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is emerging as an effective tool to study the excited-state optical activity in molecules and their self-assembled nanostructures. Chiral porphyrins are a class of optically active molecules wherein the ground-state chirality has been extensively studied in recent times using circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. However, obtaining CPL from porphyrin nanostructures, which would have vast implications in biological applications, has remained an uphill task. In this work, we design and synthesize a pair of chiral porphyrin enantiomers functionalized by axially chiral binaphthalene units at the four meso-positions. The molecule undergoes self-assembly following an isodesmic polymerization model, leading to the formation of a spherical nanostructure possessing opposite chirality. Favorable thermodynamic parameters achieved through the controlled experimental conditions helped drive the self-assembly in the forward direction. The limitations imposed by a large nonradiative decay constant arising due to the aggregation-induced quenching could be overcome by fabricating self-standing polymeric films of the nanostructures. The films exhibited relatively high radiative decay and, more interestingly, good CPL activity with clear mirror image spectra for the nanostructures with opposite chirality. The work on CPL-active solid-state materials opens avenue for the design and synthesis of a variety of porphyrin-based chromophoric systems and their nanoaggregates that can find potential application in the field of chiral biosensing and bioimaging, security tags, and display devices.