White-light emissive materials based on dynamic polymerization in supramolecular chemistry

Publication date: Available online 28 January 2017
Source:Polymer
Author(s): Yuji Kubo, Ryuhei Nishiyabu
Polymer-based materials with white-light emission have attracted much attention because of their potential applications as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and bright sensor materials. Synthesizing one polymer to cover the entire region of visible light is not easy. In addition, facile mixing of multiple kinds of emissive polymers can cause unfavorable interactions between them, making it difficult for chemists to prepare materials with this type of emission. Recently, much effort has been devoted to proposing efficient strategies toward this end, which involve multilayer systems with blends of different color-emitting polymers, single-layer polymer blends, and polymer hosts doped with fluorescent or phosphorescent dyes. By fine tuning the primary colors, i.e., red, green, and blue, or two complementary colors, e.g., cyan and orange, supramolecular polymerization can create one-dimensional assemblies with dynamic and reversible non-covalent bonds, such as hydrogen bonds, metal coordination, electrostatic interactions, hydrophobic interactions, and π‒π stacking interactions. Such adaptive and alterable features could control the amount of color-emissive components in systems where the management of energy transfer is possible. Furthermore, orthogonal polymerization provides well-defined three-dimensional assemblies. In this context, dynamic covalent bond-based polymers are also suitable to create white-light emissive materials that are relevant to supramolecular polymers. This review describes the preparation of white-light emissive materials using a rational approach based on dynamic polymerization in supramolecular chemistry.

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