A recent research work from Prof. Zhifeng Huang’s group has been published in Nature Communications, titled “Multimodal deep-learning optimization of chiroptical properties in all-inorganic perovskite-coated TiO2 nanohelices and inverse-design transfer to organic chiral luminophores.”
Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) has been catching increasing attention for developing advanced photonic displays, quantum communication, bioimaging, and chiral sensing. All inorganic chiral luminophores are superior to their organic or organic-inorganic hybrid counterparts in thermal stability, environmental robustness and device compatibility, but limited by the difficulty in fabrication and low luminescence dissymmetry factor (glum < 0.1), whereby glum is generally applied to evaluate the purity of circular polarization of CPL.
In this work, Prof. Huang’s group reported a new strategy, which chiral TiO2 nanohelices (NHs) act as chiral templates that are conformally coated with achiral perovskite luminophores composed of cesium lead bromides, to form all-inorganic chiral core@shell nano-luminophores. Given by the complex and multifactorial experimental conditions, the manual engineering of fabrication procedure leads to an optimized glum = 0.2. To further optimize glum, Prof. Huang’s group collaborated with Professor Guang-Jie Xia’s group at Great Bay University to develop OptiCPL, a few-shot multimodal deep-learning framework that integrates spectral and morphological features, to boost glum from 0.20 to 0.35 through model prediction and experimental validation. In addition, the OptiCPL model is transferrable to polymer F8BT-based chiral organic luminophores, achieving glum = 0.87, the breaking record for the F8BT-based chiral luminophores.
This work establishes a synergistic chiral core@shell approach and offers a transferable deep-learning framework for designing high-glum CPL materials. These findings establish a versatile platform for designing CPL-active materials, highlight the critical role of deep learning in accelerating the optimization of chiroptical materials, and open new opportunities for advancing optoelectronic applications in information storage, secure communication, three-dimensional displays, and bioimaging.
The co-first authors of this work are Dr. Haifeng Sun and postgraduate student Mr. Yilun Zhang.
