It is necessary and urgent to develop new materials that are sensitive to antibiotics and can detect them in wastewater. Here, we report a zwitterionic copper(I)-iodide hybrid cluster with strong luminescence and excellent stability. We demonstrate for the first time that this compound can be an efficient optical sensor for tetracyclines, a widely used type of antibiotic, in an aqueous system, with the limit of detection reaching as low as 521–851 ppb. Further, possible electron and energy transfer mechanisms are discussed. This study has opened up new applications for this type of material in the field of chemical sensing.
Hierarchically structured chiral luminescent materials hold promise for achieving efficient circularly polarized luminescence. However, a feasible chemical route to fabricate hierarchically structured chiral luminescent polycrystals is still elusive because of their complex structures and complicated formation process. We here report a biomimetic non-classical crystallization (BNCC) strategy for preparing efficient hierarchically structured chiral luminescent polycrystals using well-designed highly luminescent homochiral copper(I)-iodide hybrid clusters as basic units for non-classical crystallization. By monitoring the crystallization process, we unravel the BNCC mechanism, which involves crystal nucleation, nanoparticles aggregation, oriented attachment, and mesoscopic transformation processes. We finally obtain the circularly polarized phosphors with both high luminescent efficiency of 32% and high luminescent dissymmetry factor of 1.5 × 10 −2 , achieving the demonstration of a circularly polarized phosphor converted light emitting diode with a polarization degree of 1.84% at room temperature. Our designed BNCC strategy provides a simple, reliable, and large-scale synthetic route for preparing bright circularly polarized phosphors.