Side-Chain Engineering of Organic Crystals for Lasing Media with Tunable Flexibility

Abundant high-performance organic crystals have been reported in the past decades;however,applications of crystalline materials are seriously restricted by their notorious brittleness.Recently,some organic crystals have been designed to be deformable in response to stress,light,heat,or humidity;nevertheless,the development of flexible organic crystals currently relies on a molecular framework design.So far there is no effective strategy for constructing organic crystals with tunable flexibility based on the same luminescent skeleton.Herein,we propose a side-chain engineering strategy aimed at facilely modulating the mechanical compliance of organic crystals.Subtly changing the side chains of a single-benzeneπ-skeleton greatly alters the mechanical behaviors while maintaining the unique optical functions of the produced crystals.Optical waveguides and amplified spontaneous emissions were measured to evaluate the application potentials of the flexible crystals as soft optical transducing media.We anticipate that the proposed strategy will be expanded to regulate the mechanical compliance of other organic crystals with unique emission properties.In addition,the applications attempted preliminarily here highlight the superiority of“crystal flexibility”in flexible optoelectronics for some special application scenarios that require complex and shape changeable optical circuits.