Spatial Isolation Induced Solid-State Emissive Chiral Carbon Dots for Achieving Efficient Circularly Polarized Light Emission and Detection

Chiral carbon dots (C-dots) are highly promising for constructing advanced chiroptical materials with significant applications, especially in circularly polarized light (CPL)-related application scenarios. Herein, solid-state emissive chiral C-dots are facilely synthesized through solvent-free pyrolysis using 4,4-dibromotriphenylamine, (R/S)-1,1′-binaphthyl-2,2′-diamine and p-phenylenediamine as precursors. Structural and theoretical analyses demonstrate that reasonable interlayer spacing and extended conjugated structures effectively promote solid-state emission. The chiral C-dots exhibit intense Cotton effect and intrinsic CPL emission, with dissymmetry factors (|g_lum|) ≈6.9 × 10⁻⁴. Significantly, introducing achiral helical polyacetylene triggers reciprocal chirality transfer, leading to enhanced CPL emission with over 80-fold amplification of |g_lum|. More importantly, the induced chirality is further transferred to a series of achiral C-dots via circularly polarized energy transfer, achieving full-color CPL emissions with |g_lum| up to 10⁻². Notably, with chiral C-dots as active layer, efficient CPL photodetectors are fabricated, achieving a maximum photocurrent dissymmetry factor (|g_ph|) of 0.78 and outstanding CPL detection responsivity of 0.16 A W⁻¹. As far as known, this is the first report of CPL photodetector based on chiral C-dots. This pioneering work opens up the possibility of detecting CPL with 0D chiral luminescent nanomaterials on highly integrated photonic platforms.