Tailoring Hydrogen‐Bonding Strategy for Sequence‐Dependent and Thermo/pH Dual‐Responsive Clusteroluminescence

Abstract

AbstractRational design of monomer sequence for desired properties is challenging. This study investigates the effect of monomer distribution of double hydrophilic copolymers (DHCs) with electron‐rich units on cluster triggered emission (CTE) capacity. By means of combining latent monomer strategy, reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization and selective hydrolysis technology, the random, pseudo di‐block and the gradient DHCs consisting of pH‐responsive polyacrylic acid (PAA) segments and thermo‐responsive poly(N‐isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) segments were successfully synthesized in a controlled manner. Moreover, the gradient DHCs showed a tremendously increased luminescent intensity due to the distinct hydrogen‐bonding interaction compared to random and pseudo di‐block DHCs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported the direct correlation between luminescent intensity and sequence structure of non‐conjugated polymer. Meanwhile, thermo and pH dual‐responsive clusteroluminescence could be easily performed. This work demonstrates a novel and facile method to tailor the hydrogen‐bonding for the stimuli‐responsive light‐emitting polymers.