Recently, ionic liquid (IL)-based advanced functional photonic materials have garnered considerable attention from the scientific community, owing to their unique properties. Fabrication of various optical sensing materials within the core of ILs is becoming increasingly important for environmental protection and public safety from hazardous chemical compounds, which are the foremost obligations of the scientific community. Among them, perchlorate (ClO4–) is one of the most dangerous inorganic anions found in soil, air, and drinking water, playing a crucial role in contaminating the environment and human health. In this report, we introduced a phenanthroimidazolate-based pyrene pendant fluorescence ionic liquid, PPIPIL, and characterized it by using various spectroscopic methods. Its self-assembly behavior was examined. Neat PPIPIL exhibits a yellowish-green photoluminescence under a 365 nm UV lamp and has been utilized as a fluorescent security ink. A PPIPIL-derived water-suspended nanosensor, nPPIPIL, exhibits robust and excellent selectivity and sensitivity toward perchlorate anions, displaying turn-on cyanish photoluminosity having detection and quantification limits in the nM range. The dramatic change in photoluminosity, accompanied by a low detection limit, nPPIPIL exhibits desirable advantages having practical applicability for the detection of ClO4– ions in environmental real samples.
Ahamed et al. (Wed,) studied this question.