Strong chiroptical properties from thin films of chiral imidazole derivatives allowing for easy detection of circularly polarized luminescence

We report the synthesis and characterization of four similar chiral 1-methyl-1H-imidazole pi-conjugated derivatives. In particular, we focus on the thin film chiroptical characterization (electronic circular dichroism and circular polarized luminescence), able to highlight how small changes in the chemical structure can lead to significant variations in the solid state aggregation. For one material showing relevant circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) properties, we have been able to detect the signal with the aid of an ultra-cheap setup we designed, which in this case showed good performance in comparison to our standard CPL instrument. We demonstrated that this setup can detect CPL signals with elevated dissymmetry factor in spite of its highly reduced complexity and much lower cost if compared to conventional CPL instrumentations. Simplified pictorial representation of the ultra-cheap photoresistor-based CPL setup we designed and data obtained from it in comparison with CPL acquired with a conventional instrument.