Such an emission changes due to the photolysis of PyP5 inspired us to further explore its application in photo-writing. Thus,
polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) powders were added to a dichloromethane solution of PyP5 to give a transparent PVP/PyP5 gel (Fig. 4a)
[68]. Light green fluorescence in the gel was observed under excitation with a 365 nm lamp (Fig. 4b), suggesting PyP5 kept in its
excimer form in the gel. Mask-illumination was applied by photoirradiation of the gel covered with corresponding pictures with the
365-nm LED (Fig. 4c). After the mask-illumination for 10 min, all the gels showed the excimer fluorescence of the masked picture,
which were not observable under sunlight (Figs. 4d and e). As a comparison, the mask-illumination was carried out with a gel
containing pyrene or R1, which, however, cannot show the similar photo-writing features. Thus, the gel containing PyP5 could be a
confidential lithographic material with potential application for the secret photo-writing.
In conclusion, we synthesized a rim-differentiated C5-symmetric tiara-pillar[5]arene PyP5 in which 5 pyrenes were oriented at the
same rim of the pillar[5]arene. PyP5 showed excimer fluorescence overwhelmingly higher than the monomer fluorescence even at the
highly diluted solution as a result of the confined template effect of the pillararene framwork. The excimer fluorescence could be
switched to monomer fluorescence by photoirradiation due to the photodecomposition of PyP5, which opened up new possibility for
the application of secret photo-writing. The present study provided a new aspect of the application of pillar[n]arenes by virtue of the
highly ordered arrangement of the functional groups anchored on the rims, and should open a new avenue for the application of
pillar[n]arenes.
Declaration of interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the support of this work by National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFA0505903),
the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21871194, 21971169, 21572142), Science & Technology Department of
Sichuan Province (Nos. 2019YJ0160, 2019YJ0090), Comprehensive Training Platform of Specialized Laboratory, College of
Chemistry and Prof. Peng Wu of Analytical & Testing Center, Sichuan University.
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