Flexible Organic Chiral Crystals with Thermal and Excitation Modulation of the Emission for Information Transmission, Writing, and Storage

Organic single crystals quickly emerge as dense yet light and nearly defect-free media for emissive elements. Integration of functionalities and control over the emissive properties is currently being explored for a wide range of these materials to benchmark their performance against organic emissive materials diluted in powders or films. Here, we report mechanically flexible emissive chiral organic crystals capable of an unprecedented combination of fast, reversible, and low-fatigue responses. UV-excited single crystals of both enantiomers of the material, 4-chloro-2-(((1-phenylidene)imino)methyl)phenol, exhibit a drastic yet reversible change in the emission color from green to orange-yellow within a second and can be cycled at least 2000 times. The photoresponse was found to depend strongly on the excitation intensity and temperature. Combining chirality, mechanical compliance, rapid emission switching, multiple responses, and writability by UV light, this material provides a unique and versatile platform for developing organic crystal-based materials for on-demand signal transfer, information storage, and cryptography.