Luminescent materials are applied to a wide range of fields due to their many beneficial properties. As they allow for visualizing of previously invisible events or processes, it allows researchers glimpses to better understand a myriad of different phenomena. The development of luminescent materials had stabilized for a long time producing mechanistic insights such as planar π-conjugated systems to produce a diverse library of conventional emissive materials. However, these rigid planar materials often suffer from an undesired effect of quenching in the solid or aggregated state, which has since been termed as aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ).

With the popularization of emissive materials that show aggregation-induced emission (AIE), there has been new growth of the developm...[ Read more ]

Luminescent materials are applied to a wide range of fields due to their many beneficial properties. As they allow for visualizing of previously invisible events or processes, it allows researchers glimpses to better understand a myriad of different phenomena. The development of luminescent materials had stabilized for a long time producing mechanistic insights such as planar π-conjugated systems to produce a diverse library of conventional emissive materials. However, these rigid planar materials often suffer from an undesired effect of quenching in the solid or aggregated state, which has since been termed as aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ).

With the popularization of emissive materials that show aggregation-induced emission (AIE), there has been new growth of the development of luminescent materials. Exploiting their on/off nature of their emission when their molecular motions are restricted/free, researchers have found AIE active materials suitable for applications in many multidisciplinary fields, often outperforming conventional systems.

In this work, molecules that exhibit AIE activity different from the first mechanism of restriction of intramolecular rotations are investigated to better understand other similar AIE systems that lack rotatable moieties. In addition, new AIE active compounds are synthesized by converting conventional fluorophores that originally displayed ACQ properties, demonstrating a new method to generate AIE molecules. Furthermore, the functional application of new AIE systems were also explored for the use of food safety monitoring, visualizing solid-state molecular motions, as well as organic long persistent luminescence.