Chiral transcription in self-assembled tetrahedral Eu<sub>4</sub>L<sub>6</sub> chiral cages displaying sizable circularly polarized luminescence.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29066720.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-017-01025-1 and PMC identifier 5783948.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Predictable stereoselective formation of supramolecular assembly is generally believed to be an important but complicated process. Here, we show that point chirality of a ligand decisively influences its supramolecular assembly behavior. We designed three closely related chiral ligands with different point chiralities, and observe their self-assembly into europium (Eu) tetrametallic tetrahedral cages. One ligand exhibits a highly diastereoselective assembly into homochiral (either ΔΔΔΔ or ΛΛΛΛ) Eu tetrahedral cages whereas the two other ligands, with two different approaches of loosened point chirality, lead to a significant breakdown of the diastereoselectivity to generate a mixture of (ΔΔΔΔ and ΛΛΛΛ) isomers. The cages are highly emissive (luminescence quantum yields of 16(1) to 18(1)%) and exhibit impressive circularly polarized luminescence properties (|g lum|: up to 0.16). With in-depth studies, we present an example that correlates the nonlinear enhancement of the chiroptical response to the nonlinearity dependence on point chirality.