Crystal Engineering of a Hydrazone Molecule toward High Elasticity and Bright Luminescence

Flexible
luminescent crystals have attracted increasing attention
on account of the potential application value in optical material
fields. How to design crystals with high elasticity and bright luminescence
is an urgent duty that material researchers want to effectuate. Crystal
engineering could achieve different crystal materials with various
functions based on one molecular structure. Therefore, crystal engineering
provides a potential strategy to improve the properties of flexible
crystals. In this paper, we gave a pioneer work to improve the properties
of flexible luminescent crystals by designing on crystal structure.
By disclosing the relationship of structure–property, our work
extracted the advantages (elasticity or bright emission) of two inferior
crystals and obtained three elastic bending crystals with outstanding
emission behaviors. Notably, our work not only achieves the fabrication
of flexible crystals based on crystal engineering aspect but also
provides good candidates for flexible optical waveguiding materials.