Research Projects

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) is the differential emission of left- and right-handed circularly polarized light by a chiral luminescent molecule. CPL of a molecule or material provides information about its excited-state chirality. CPL-activity of a luminophore is quantified in terms of the magnitude of the luminescence dissymmetry factor glum (glum = 2(IL − IR)/(IL + IR), where IL and IR are the luminescence intensities of left- and right-handed circularly polarized light, respectively). In recent years, CPL-active material has received considerable research interest given its potential utilization in spintronics-based devices, 3D displays, optical information storage, sensors, and lasers. The practical applicability of CPL materials depends on their glum (high) and quantum yield (ϕF) in the solid/condensed state. Lanthanide complexes have high glum because of inherent magnetic anisotropy; however, they exhibit low φF. Furthermore, limited structural designs, rarity, and toxicity limit their practical applications. Recently, chiral SOMs have received much attention owing to their inherent advantages such as facile synthesis, amenable structural modifications, emission color tunability, stability, and easy processability over the lanthanide compounds. SOMs show modest |glum|in the solution state, but they exhibit negligible φF, and glum may be due to aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ), which poses the major obstacle to their utility in hi-tech applications. Recent efforts have been devoted to developing materials with high luminescence quantum yield (ΦF) and high glum that can find immense potential in various chiroptical applications. However, the importance of chiral imaging in biological applications is under-explored mainly due to the unavailability of excellent CPL-bio probes. Thus, there is a growing quest for developing materials with better CPL activity. These issues necessitate further studies on the design and development of better CPL-active organic molecules. Further, a strong understanding of the relationship between CPL activity and molecular structure of organic luminophores needs to be developed to aid in their molecular design and to improve CPL activity. To address these problems, using our expertise in boron chemistry, we plan to develop boron-doped chiroptic materials. Design, development, and appraisal of novel luminophores will be carried out. Synthesized boron-based luminophores will be screened for optoelectronic materials development and CP bio-imaging. Chemical knowledge acquired in this project will be utilized for a better understanding of the functional properties of chiral luminophores and may lead to the development of next-generation smart materials. The exciting prospect of realizing these objectives is the main motivation for this proposal.

Boron, Aminoborane, Chiral Photoluminescence, Bio-imaging, Organometallics, Inorganic