Helical Nanoconfinement in Recyclable Chiral Soft Photonic Crystals Enables Strong and Efficient Full‐Color Circularly Polarized Luminescence From Carbon Quantum Dots

Abstract

ABSTRACT Circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) materials typically suffer from a fundamental trade‐off between the luminescence dissymmetry factors (g lum ) and photoluminescence quantum yields (PLQYs), which severely limit their practical implementation. Here, we exploit helical nanoconfinement within a recyclable chiral soft photonic crystal (SPC) to break this trade‐off, achieving, for the first time, strong, and efficient full‐color CPL from a series of environmentally friendly achiral carbon quantum dots (CQDs). The SPC films retain a three‐dimensional helical nanopore network inherited from a chiral liquid‐crystal template. This long‐range helical nanoconfinement simultaneously imparts strong chiroptical activity to the embedded CQDs and suppresses their aggregation‐caused quenching. Consequently, blue‐, green‐, red‐, and deep‐red‐emissive CQD@SPC composites exhibit high |g lum | values up to 0.48 together with exceptional PLQYs of up to 92% across the visible spectrum. The SPC host is fully recyclable, maintaining its chiral nanostructure and CPL performance over multiple loading‐elution cycles. Moreover, integrating blue‐, green‐, and red‐emissive CQDs within the SPC produces white‐light CPL with a record‐high |g lum | of 0.64, and the platform simultaneously accommodates multilevel optical encryption functionalities. This work establishes helical nanoconfinement in recyclable SPCs as a versatile solid‐state strategy for generating high‐performance CPL from environmentally friendly CQDs, opening avenues toward advanced chiroptical technologies.