Nonvolatile liquid anthracenes for facile full-colour luminescence tuning at single blue-light excitation

Nonvolatile room-temperature luminescent molecular liquids are a new generation of organic soft materials. They possess high stability, versatile optical properties, solvent-free fluid behaviour and can effectively accommodate dopant dye molecules. Here we introduce an approach to optimize anthracene-based liquid materials, focussing on enhanced stability, fluorescence quantum yield, colour tunability and processability, with a view to flexible electronic applications. Enveloping the anthracene core in low-viscosity branched aliphatic chains results in stable, nonvolatile, emissive liquid materials. Up to 96% efficient energy-transfer-assisted tunable emission is achieved by doping a minute amount of acceptor dye in the solvent-free state. Furthermore, we use a thermoresponsive dopant to impart thermally controllable luminescence colours. The introduced strategy leading to diverse luminescence colours at a single blue-light excitation can be an innovative replacement for currently used luminescent materials, providing useful continuous emissive layers in developing foldable devices.