Triarylmethanolation as a versatile strategy for the conversion of PAHs into amorphization-induced emission luminogens for extremely sensitive explosive detection and fabrication of artificial light-harvesting systems

Current synthetic strategies involving pi-system coupling reactions for the molecular design of luminescent materials suffer from the challenging precise synthesis on the desired reactive site and also difficulty in solubility derived from the rigid structures of pi-systems. Herein, a novel and versatile triarylmethanolation strategy for the molecular design of luminescent materials with facile synthesis and good solubility is reported. The prepared luminescent materials exhibit unique amorphization-induced emission (AmIE) behaviours, which represent an entropy-favoured and ubiquitous type of aggregation-induced emission that is currently famous and is contrary to crystallization-induced emission. Due to the outstanding AmIE behaviours, the luminescent materials exhibit applications in the fields of rewritable display and storage, extremely sensitive explosive detection at the ppb level, and high-efficiency artificial light-harvesting system with an antenna effect up to 21.3. This work therefore expands the methodology, structure, and functionality libraries of luminescent materials with outstanding properties in the application fields of explosive detection, energy transfer, and artificial light-harvesting systems.