Xianpeng Yin

Polydopamine-based photonic crystal structures

Active photonic crystals (PC) or photonic crystal heterostructures have many applications such as chemical and biological sensors, active colour displays, structural colour printing and fluorescence enhancement. However, photonic crystal structures with the different functions mentioned above require different preparation methods, and some of them require sophisticated instruments for specific production processes. Thus, development of a simple way or a useful platform for conveniently fabricating specific photonic crystal structures with different functions is highly desirable and significant. Herein, by exploiting the self-polymerization of dopamine, we successfully introduced polydopamine (PDA) into silica opaline templates and produced PDA photonic crystal structures. Based on the utilization of the unique properties of PDA such as reactivity, reductive ability, powerful adhesive capability as well as carbonizable feature, PDA-based photonic crystal structures provide a very useful platform for further convenient fabrication of multifunctional photonic crystal structures with a variety of potential applications. Due to the virtually unlimited variety provided by the active secondary reactions of PDA, the post-modification of PDA-based photonic crystals can readily afford photonic crystal based chemical or biological sensors. The reductive as well as adhesive ability of PDA provides another tremendous opportunity to produce photonic crystal heterostructures with various metals, metal oxides, polymer or semiconductor nanoparticles. As a demonstration, PDA/Ag/PDA and PDA/Pt/PDA opaline structures were prepared by PDA-assisted metallization or adsorption, respectively, which could find promising application in fluorescence enhancement of organic dyes or chemical solvent sensors. More importantly, the carbonizable feature of PDA allows for efficiently producing carbon inverse opaline films as well as metal particle doped carbon inverse opaline films by carbonizing the corresponding PDA, PDA/Ag/PDA or PDA/Pt/PDA photonic structures, which may show various potential applications in catalysis and energy conversion.

Efficient Construction of Well-Defined Multicompartment Porous Systems in a Modular and Chemically Orthogonal Fashion

A microfluidic assembly approach was developed for efficiently producing hydrogel spheres with reactive multidomains that can be employed as an advantageous platform to create spherical porous networks in a facile manner with well-defined multicompartments and spatiotemporally controlled functions. This strategy allows for not only large scale fabrication of various robust hydrogel microspheres with controlled size and porosity, but also the domains embedded in hydrogel network could be introduced in a modular manner. Additionally, the number of different domains and their ratio could be widely variable on demand. More importantly, the reactive groups distributed in individual domains could be used as anchor sites to further incorporate functional units in an orthogonal fashion, leading to well-defined multicompartment systems. The strategy provides a new and efficient route to construct well-defined functional multicompartment systems with great flexibility and extendibility.

Electrothermally Driven Fluorescence Switching by Liquid Crystal Elastomers Based On Dimensional Photonic Crystals

In this article, the fabrication of an active organic-inorganic one-dimensional photonic crystal structure to offer electrothermal fluorescence switching is described. The film is obtained by spin-coating of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) and TiO2 nanoparticles alternatively. By utilizing the property of LCEs that can change their size and shape reversibly under external thermal stimulations, the λmax of the photonic band gap of these films is tuned by voltage through electrothermal conversion. The shifted photonic band gap further changes the matching degree between the photonic band gap of the film and the emission spectrum of organic dye mounting on the film. With rhodamine B as an example, the enhancement factor of its fluorescence emission is controlled by varying the matching degree. Thus, the fluorescence intensity is actively switched by voltage applied on the system, in a fast, adjustable, and reversible manner. The control chain of using the electrothermal stimulus to adjust fluorescence intensity via controlling the photonic band gap is proved by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) and UV-vis reflectance. This mechanism also corresponded to the results from the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation. The comprehensive usage of photonic crystals and liquid crystal elastomers opened a new possibility for active optical devices.

Controlled Fabrication of Functional Capsules Based on the Synergistic Interaction between Polyphenols and MOFs under Weak Basic Condition

Metal-organic coordination materials with controllable nanostructures are of widespread interest due to the coupled benefits of inorganic/organic building blocks and desired architectures. In this work, based on the finding of a synergistic interaction between metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and natural polyphenols under weak basic condition, a facile strategy has been developed for directly fabricating diverse phenolic-inspired functional materials or metal-phenolic frameworks (MPFs) with controlled hollow nanostructures (polyhedral core-shell, rattle-like, hollow cage, etc.) and controllable size, morphology, and roughness, as well as composition. By further incorporating the diverse functionalities of polyphenols such as low toxicity and therapeutic properties, catalytic activity, and ability to serve as carbon precursors, into the novel assemblies, diverse artificially designed nanoarchitectures with target functionalities have been generated for an array of applications.

Pyrrole-Terminated Ionic Liquid Surfactant: One Molecule with Multiple Functions for Controlled Synthesis of Diverse Multispecies Co-Doped Porous Hollow Carbon Spheres.

Rationally and efficiently controlling chemical composition, microstructure, and morphology of carbon nanomaterials plays a crucial role in significantly enhancing their functional properties and expending their applications. In this work, a novel strategy for simultaneously controlling these structural parameters was developed on the base of a multifunctional precursor approach, in which the precursor not only serves as carbon source and structure-directing agent, but also contains two heteroatom doping sites. As exemplified by using pyrrole-terminated ionic liquid surfactant as such precursor, in conjunction with sol-gel chemistry this strategy allows for efficiently producing well-defined hollow carbon spheres with controlled microstructure and chemical compositions. Remarkably, the dual-doping sites in confined silica channels provide an exciting opportunity and flexibility to access various doped carbons through simply anion exchange or altering the used oxidative polymerization agent, especially the multispecies codoped materials by combination of the two doping modes. All the results indicate that the described strategy may open up a new avenue for efficiently synthesizing functional carbon materials with highly controllable capability.

Chemically Patterned Inverse Opal Created by a Selective Photolysis Modification Process.

Anisotropic photonic crystal materials have long been pursued for their broad applications. A novel method for creating chemically patterned inverse opals is proposed here. The patterning technique is based on selective photolysis of a photolabile polymer together with postmodification on released amine groups. The patterning method allows regioselective modification within an inverse opal structure, taking advantage of selective chemical reaction. Moreover, combined with the unique signal self-reporting feature of the photonic crystal, the fabricated structure is capable of various applications, including gradient photonic bandgap and dynamic chemical patterns. The proposed method provides the ability to extend the structural and chemical complexity of the photonic crystal, as well as its potential applications.

Block Copolymers Templated Approach to Nanopatterned Metal-organic Framework films

The fabrication of patterned metal-organic framework (MOF) films with precisely controlled nanoscale resolution has been a fundamental challenge in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In this study, nanopatterned MOF films were fabricated using a layer-by-layer (LBL) growth method on functional templates (such as a bicontinuous nanoporous membrane or a structure with highly long-range-ordered nanoscopic channels parallel to the underlying substrate) generated by the microphase separation of polystyrene-b-poly(2-vinylpyridine) (PS-b-P2VP) block copolymers. HKUST-1 can be directly deposited on the templates without any chemical modification because the pyridine groups in P2VP interact with metal ions via metal-BCP complexes. As a result, nanopatterned HKUST-1 films with feature sizes below 50 nm and controllable thicknesses can be fabricated by controlling the number of LBL growth cycles. The proposed fabrication method further extends the applications of MOFs in various fields.

Guanidinium-Based Polymerizable Surfactant as a Multifunctional Molecule for Controlled Synthesis of Nanostructured Materials with Tunable Morphologies

Rationally and efficiently controlling the morphology of nanomaterials plays a crucial role in significantly enhancing their functional properties and expending their applications. In this work, a strategy for controlled synthesis of diverse nanostructured materials with tunable morphologies was developed using a guanidinium-based surfactant with a polymerizable pyrrole unit as a multifunctional molecule that can serve not only as a structure-directing agent for mesostucture formation but also as a monomer and carbon source. The unique self-assembly behavior of the guanidinium head group under different conditions allows the synthesized surfactants to form different aggregates and thus to produce silica nanomaterials with multiple morphologies (such as sphere, disk, fiber, and cocoon) in conjunction with sol-gel chemistry. Besides the mesostructured silicates, by further exploring the polymerization and carbonization features of pyrrole units that were densely packed in the formed silica nanochannels, diverse nanostructured materials such as mesostructured conducting polymers, carbon materials, and metal-nanoparticle (NP)-decorated forms could also be easily obtained in one-pot fashion for various applications, such as energy storage and catalysis. As a demonstration, carbon nanotubes and Pd-NP-doped hollow carbon spheres were fabricated, which exhibited good specific capacitance (101.7 F g-1) at the scan rates of 5 mV s-1 and excellent catalytic performance (100% conversion for three cycles) in the Suzuki C-C coupling reaction, respectively. All of the results indicate that our strategy may open a new avenue for efficiently accessing diverse nanostructured materials with tunable morphologies for wide applications.