KEYWORDS
CEAA dyes, microreactor, light-harvesting, FRET.
To address the energy challenges, scientists have designed various artificial light-harvesting systems inspired by photosynthesis. Notably, for light-harvesting systems, an energy-transfer efficiency close to 100% with an antenna effect greater than 10 is generally considered a good application criterion.1 Today, building an efficient light-harvesting system at a low cost is still demanding.
Recently, Tao et al. prepared a series of coemissive luminescent nanoparticles (called CEAA dyes) using ordinary aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) and aggregation-induced emission (AIE) dyes.2 The CEAA dye system provides an efficient Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) platform. The authors constructed an effective light-harvesting system with energy-transfer and antenna efficiencies of 99.37% and 26.23, respectively, using tetraphenylene (TPE), coumarin 6 (C-6), and Nile red (NiR) as raw materials (Figure 1B, C). There have been excellent reports on the co-emission of AIE and ACQ dyes in the literature.3,4In this paper, the authors adjusted the content of the energy intermediate C-6, which resulted in CEAA nanoparticles with a controlled FRET composition. For more efficient mass transfer, CEAA dyes were synthesized in a continuous-flow microreactor (Figure 1A), and the luminescence composition can be easily adjusted on demand.