Light-Driven Energy Transfer in Luminescent Helical Superstructures Coassembled by Inorganic and Organic Molecules

In recent years, controllable circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials with a high luminescence dissymmetry factor (g lum) have attracted great interest due to their potential applications, such as optical display, optical data storage, optical encryption, and anticounterfeiting, which has become a popular research topic in the field of functional optoelectronic materials. In this work, by incorporating achiral CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (QDs) and the photochromic molecule, hydroxyl-containing spiropyran (SP-OH), into chiral nematic liquid crystals (N*-LCs) with a regular self-assembled helical superstructure, reversibly phototuning CPL in color and g lum values based on the Fo''rster resonance energy-transfer process from CdSe/ZnS QDs to SP-OH is successfully developed. The change of emission intensity and the enhancement of g lum value demonstrate the existence of efficient energy transfer, which can be regulated on the basis of reversible photoisomerization process of SP-OH, resulting in various CPL emissions with enhanced g lum value up to 1.0. This work can potentially be applied to chiral information storage and coding. Meanwhile, this provides a new method and idea for the preparation of intelligent and efficient CPL materials.