Aggregation‐Induced Emission Luminogens for Direct Exfoliation of 2D Layered Materials in Ethanol

Abstract Aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) luminogens are an important type of advanced functional materials with fantastic optical properties and have found potential applications in organic electronics, biochemistry, and molecular imaging. Herein, this article presents a novel application of AIE luminogens (AIEgens) for efficient exfoliation of layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs, such as MoS₂ and WSe₂). From the ¹H NMR spectroscopic analysis, the designed AIEgens can insert into the space between layers of MoS₂ in ethanol solution and the dynamic molecular rotation against the weak interactions affords large‐scale few‐layer MoS₂ nanosheets (7–8 layers) with enhanced smoothness. The 3D AIEgens play a significant role in preserving the crystal lattice of MoS₂ even at high pressure (>15 GPa). More importantly, the new approach can also be used for exfoliation of WSe₂ to achieve large‐scale few‐layer nanosheets. The present work thus provides a facile and high yielding synthetic method for accessing on a large scale 2D layered materials with enhanced properties for high‐technology applications.