Luminescent liquid crystals have received much attention both in scientific and industrial fields due to their combination of intrinsic light-emitting ability and self-healing features within a liquid crystalline phase. However, the preparation of highly efficient luminescent liquid crystals is still a challenge. The traditional strategy is to combine intrinsic light-emitting moiety group with mesogenic moiety. However, it is not easy to incorporate emissive functional groups into liquid crystals while retaining their mesogenic properties. Moreover, the luminescence may be weakened due to the intermolecular interactions of the highly ordered packing molecules.
To address this problem, Profs. Mingming Zhang, Feng Liu and co-workers from Xi'an Jiaotong University designed and synthesized rhomboidal metallacycles via metal-coordination self-assembly. These metallacycles show emission properties both in solution and in solid state. More importantly, although neither of the building blocks exhibits mesophases, one of metallacycles shows clear thermotropic and lyotropic liquid-crystalline phases. The formation of metallacylic structures offers a platform beneficial for molecular stacking while the branched alkyl and ethylene glycol chains help stabilize the columnar mesophases. This work provides a simple yet efficient approach to the construction of luminescent metallacycle-cored liquid crystals and explores the use of metal-coordination interactions to induce liquid crystal formation, which are of great importance for both mechanistic understanding and their applications towards flat-panel displays.
Recently, this work entitled ‘Luminescent Metallacycle-Cored Liquid Crystals Induced by Metal-Coordination’ was published in Angew. Chem. Int. Chem. Profs. Mingming Zhang and Feng Liu are the corresponding authors. Long Chen, a PhD student of MSE, is the first author for this work. The State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials is the first author affiliation. This work was funded by the NSFC of China, the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province.
Link for this paper：https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201915055.
