Homochiral Metal-Organic Framework Microcrystals for Circularly Polarized Lasing.

Abstract

Chiral framework materials offer a promising platform for exploring circularly polarized lasing. However, the creation of chirality in current optical gain framework materials relies on the chirality transfer, which suffers from weak chiral light-matter interactions and thus limits the dissymmetry factors of circularly polarized laser emission. Here, we propose to synthesize homochiral metal-organic frameworks (MOF) from chiral optical gain molecules to enhance chiral light-matter interactions, enabling circularly polarized lasing with large dissymmetry factors. The MOFs are grown controllably into 1D microcrystals to function as Fabry-Pérot cavities providing optical feedback for laser oscillations. In addition, the chiral optical gain molecules in the frameworks exhibit high luminescence efficiencies of ∼88% because the rigid frameworks effectively suppress nonradiative decay, resulting in low-threshold lasing. More importantly, the homochiral optical gain frameworks can enhance chiral light-matter interactions, which allows for circularly polarized laser emission with dissymmetry factors larger than 1.0. Our work establishes a homochiral framework material platform for exploring high-performance circularly polarized lasing.