Multiple Stimuli-Responsive Luminescent Chiral Hybrid Antimony Chlorides for Anti-Counterfeiting and Encryption Applications.

Stimuli-responsive circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials are ideal for information anti-countering applications, but the best-performing materials have not yet been identified. This work presents enantiomorphic hybrid antimony halides R-(C H NO) SbCl (1) and S-(C H NO) SbCl (2) showing mirror-imaged CPL activity with a dissymmetry factor of 1.2×10 . Interestingly, the DMF-induced structural transformation is realized to obtain non-emissive R-(C H NO) SbCl  ⋅ DMF (3) and S-(C H NO) SbCl  ⋅ DMF (4) upon exposure to DMF vapor. The transformation process is reversed upon heating. DFT calculations showed that the DMF-induced-quenched-luminescence is attributed to the intersection of the ground and excited state curves on the configuration coordinates. Unexpectedly, the nanocrystals of the chiral antimony halides 1 and 2 were prepared and indicate the excellent solution process performance. The reversible PL and CPL switching gives the system applications in information technology, anti-counterfeiting, encryption-decryption, and logic gates.