Issue 12, 2023

BINOL-like atropisomeric chiral nanographene

Abstract

Interest in making chiral polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) or nanographenes (NGs) has greatly increased recently. To date, a majority of chiral nanocarbons have been designed based on helical chirality. Here, we describe a novel atropisomeric chiral oxa-NG 1 by the selective dimerization of naphthalene-containing, hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene (HBC)-based PAH 6. The photophysical properties of the oxa-NG 1 and monomer 6 were investigated, including UV-vis absorption (λmax = 358 nm for 1 and 6), fluorescence emission (λem = 475 nm for 1 and 6), fluorescence decay (15 vs. 16 ns), and fluorescence quantum yield, and it was found that the photophysical properties of the monomer are nearly maintained in the NG dimer due to its perpendicular conformation. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis shows that both enantiomers cocrystallize in a single crystal, and the racemic mixture can be resolved by chiral high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The circular dichroism (CD) spectra and circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) of the enantiomers of 1-S and 1-R were studied and the CD and CPL spectra exhibited opposite Cotton effects and fluorescence signals. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations and HPLC-based thermal isomerization results showed that the racemic barrier is as high as 35 kcal mol−1, suggesting a rigid chiral nanographene structure. Meanwhile, in vitro studies indicated that oxa-NG 1 is an efficient photosensitizer for white-light-induced singlet oxygen generation.

Graphical abstract: BINOL-like atropisomeric chiral nanographene

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
13 Nov 2022
Accepted
20 Feb 2023
First published
21 Feb 2023
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2023,14, 3286-3292

BINOL-like atropisomeric chiral nanographene

S. Li, R. Li, Y. Zhang, S. Wang, B. Ma, B. Zhang and P. An, Chem. Sci., 2023, 14, 3286 DOI: 10.1039/D2SC06244E

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements