Industrial Chemistry & Water Treatment

Luminescent organic polymers are important materials for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) due to their tunable emission properties through molecular design and their inherent flexible nature and readiness in fabrication.  Especially, circularly-polarized light (CPL) emitting polymers are drawing attention because CPL can be applied for energy-saving LCD backlights and 3D OLED displays.  Toward this end, several chiral OELD polymers and low-molecular-weight compounds have been synthesized; however, majority of the existing polymers have linear conjugated structures.  For such polymers, there are two aspects that need to be improved, i.e., (1) their emission tends to be of lower energy (longer wavelength) due to the presence of the main-chain conjugation, and (2) inter-chain interactions including excimer formation often result in low emission efficiency.  We herein present the design and synthesis of a vinyl polymer having a -stacked, helical conformation that exhibits higher-energy CPL emission (poly(BBPDBF)) [1-5] and a hyperbranched polymer that emits green CPL with high anisotropy in addition to a main-chain conjugated polymer [6].  In addition, as a novel, facile method of creating optically active, CPL-emitting polymers, we introduce the CPL-irradiation method.  Several polymers including poly(DOF) have been made single-handed helical without using any optically active chemicals to induce chiral structure to polymer [7,8]. Optically active polymers prepared using CPL emitted efficient CPL on photo excitation.