Noncovalently Modulated Chiral Nanoclays for Circularly Polarized Luminescence Color Conversion

Incorporating chirality to 2D architectures could greatly expand their applications due to their merits of large surface area and fine dispersity in solution compared with 1D or 3D materials, which however remains to have considerable challenges so far. In this work, we present the successful incorporation of chirality at different levels with 2D clay nanosheets where luminescent and circularly polarized luminescence color conversion could be realized. N-terminal π-conjugated chiral amino acids were utilized as chiral species to induce the formation of chiral environments on an aminoclay surface via electrostatic attraction. The noncovalently modified chiral nanoclay sheets shall undergo self-assembly into 1D twisted fibers, showing emerged nanoscale chirality. Such a noncovalently modified chiral surface of clay provided a matrix to accommodate guest molecules, whereby an electron-deficient compound was effectively trapped through charge-transfer interaction. A synergistic effect was observed in such ternary assemblies, allowing for the emergence of luminescent and circularly polarized luminescence color conversion from blue to red with a high dissymmetry g-factor up to 2.1 × 10–2. This study offers an effective and facile manner to synthesize chiral mineral 2D materials with fine chiroptical responses.