Solvent Modulation of Chiral Perovskite Films Enables High Circularly Polarized Luminescence Performance from Chiral Perovskite/Quantum Dot Composites

Materials with circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) activity are promising in many chiroptoelectronics fields, such as for biological probes, asymmetric photosynthesis, information storage, spintronic devices, and so on. Promoting the value of the dissymmetry factor (glum) for the CPL-active materials based on chiral perovskite draws increasing attention since a higher glum value indicates better CPL. In this work, we find that, after being treated with a facile solvent modulation strategy, the chirality of 2D chiral perovskite films has been enhanced a lot, which we attribute to an increased lattice distortion degree. By forming chiral perovskite/quantum dot (QD) composites, the CPL-active material is successfully obtained. The calculated maximum |glum| of these composites increased over 4 times after solvent modulation treatment (1.53 × 10-3 for the pristine sample of R-DMF and 6.91 × 10-3 for R-NMP) at room temperature. Moreover, the enhancement of the CPL intensity is ascribed to two aspects: one is the generation and transportation of spin-polarized charge carriers from chiral perovskite films to combine in the QD layer, and the other is the solvent modulation strategy to enlarge the lattice distortion of chiral perovskite films. This facile route provides an effective way to construct CPL-active materials. More importantly, this kind of composite material (chiral perovskite film/QD layer) can be easily applied for fabricating circularly polarized light-emitting diode devices for electroluminescence.

Solvent modulation in peptide sub-microfibers obtained by solution blow spinning

Peptides possess high chemical diversity at the amino acid sequence level, which further translates into versatile functions. Peptides with self-assembling properties can be processed into diverse formats giving rise to bio-based materials. Peptide-based spun fibers are an interesting format due to high surface-area and versatility, though the field is still in its infancy due to the challenges in applying the synthetic polymer spinning processes to protein fibers to peptides. In this work we show the use of solution blow-spinning to produce peptide fibers. Peptide fiber formation was assisted by the polymer poly (vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP) in two solvent conditions. Peptide miscibility and further self-assembling propensity in the solvents played a major role in fiber formation. When employing acetic acid as solvent, peptide fibers (0.5 μm) are formed around PVP fibers (0.75 μm), whereas in isopropanol only one type of fibers are formed, consisting of mixed peptide and PVP (1 μm). This report highlights solvent modulation as a mean to obtain different peptide sub-microfibers via a single injection nozzle in solution blow spinning. We anticipate this strategy to be applied to other small peptides with self-assembly propensity to obtain multi-functional proteinaceous fibers.