Green grinding-coassembly engineering toward intrinsically luminescent tetracene in cocrystals

• Main Authors: Huang, Yinjuan, Gong, Qiuyu, Ge, Jing, Tang, Pengpeng, Yu, Fei, Xiao, Lian, Wang, Zongrui, Sun, Handong, Yu, Jing, Li, Dong-Sheng, Xiong, Qihua, Zhang, Qichun
• Other Authors: School of Materials Science and Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Materials; Science::Chemistry; Two-Step; Liquid-Assisted-Grinding Coassembly; Tetracene; Intrinsic Emission; Solid State; Cocrystal Inks
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/154731
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Developing an effective and green method toward organic functional cocrystals based on the solubility-mismatched coformers is highly desirable and very important. Herein, we applied a green two-step liquid-assisted-grinding coassembly (LAGC) in fabricating tetracene-octafluoronaphthalene (TC-OFN) cocrystals from solubility-mismatched pairs of tetracene (TC, poorly soluble, 0.2 mg mL-1) and octafluoronaphthalene (OFN, highly soluble, 0.2 × 104 mg mL-1). Such cocrystals are extremely difficult to prepare through the common solution-processing strategies. More importantly, this two-step LAGC process could allow us to efficiently prepare TC-OFN cocrystals in gram scale. The as-prepared cocrystals displayed the intrinsic green emission of TC with much higher photoluminescence quantum yield (13.75%) comparing with the pure solid TC with the almost-quenched emission (0.41%, aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ)). The ultrafast spectra study on these cocrystals verifies the successful barrier function of OFN molecules in interrupting the well-known singlet fission (SF) in TC solids. Furthermore, this method can allow us to easily fabricate fluorescent TC-OFN water inks, which can be employed to prepare luminescent paintings or highly emissive ultratransparent/flexible films.