International Summer School PROGRAM - Laboratoire d'Infochimie ...

Zwitterion-chromophore modules for
white light emitting supramolecular polymers
Ina Krebs and Carsten Schmuck
Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstraße 7, 45141
Essen, Germany
With my talk I intend to show the synthesis of chromophore-zwitterion modules for
supramolecular white light emitting polymers. These polymers would be formed via the selfassembly
of the zwitterionic subunits. Therefore I use the self-complementary
guanidiniocarbonylpyrrole-zwitterion developed by our group which has already been
successfully used to obtain water stable supramolecular polymers and other nanostructured
materials such as vesicles. [1,2] By combining this zwitterion with different fluorescent
chromophores, light emitting supramolecular polymers should be accessible.
Figure 1: Synthesized molecules.
As known from the theory behind different color spaces, white light emission is obtained by
mixing different colored dyes e.g. red, green and blue dyes. With the right mixing ratio of
different colored zwitterions-chromophore units it should be possible to get a white light
emitting solution. The main advantage of this zwitterion driven supramolecular aggregation,
besides its stability in aqueous solutions, is that the self-aggregation can be reversibly
switched on and off e.g. by pH adjustments.
[1] C. Schmuck, W. Wienand, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2002, 125, 452 - 459.
[2] C. Schmuck, T. Rehm, K. Klein, F. Gröhn, Angew. Chem. 2007, 46, 1693 - 1697.