Engineering Host–Guest Interactions to Drive Enhanced and Tunable Chiral Emission in Achiral Porphyrin Nanostructures

Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL), an emergent technique to study excited state optical activity, is recently finding vast applications in diverse fields. The research focus has been to develop facile strategies to overcome the low luminescence dissymmetry exhibited by molecules and materials. We herein demonstrate a host–guest approach to achieve intense chiral luminescence in a series of achiral porphyrin nanostructures through their self-assembly with a chiral gelator. Efforts focused toward formulating a structure–property correlation revealed that modulating the host–guest interactions is critical to the generation as well as tuning of the CPL activity. Luminescence dissymmetry as high as 0.015 could be achieved through a judicious design strategy. The applicability of the as synthesized nanohybrid as a potential chiral light emitting device is demonstrated by coating the nanocomposite onto an LED surface.