Circularly Polarized Luminescence of Highly Stable Trinuclear Lanthanide Clusters and Their Photocatalytic Purification of Dye and Antibiotic Wastewater

This work achieves a functional switch from efficient CPL to excellent photocatalytic ROS generation on a chiral trinuclear lanthanide cluster (R/S-Eu3) structural platform with the same linkage through a simple metal center substitution. Specifically, the metal center of R/S-Eu3 is formed by a rigid triangular cluster core bridged by μ3-Cl–, and it is tightly surrounded by six chiral (R/S-BNP)− ligands. High-resolution electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (HRESI-MS) confirmed that R/S-Eu3 has excellent stability in solution. R/S-Eu3 exhibits bright Eu(III) ion red characteristic luminescence and significant CPL behavior, with a luminescence asymmetry factor |glum| reaching up to 0.035. Furthermore, when the metal center is replaced with Gd(III), the resulting R-Gd3-closed antenna effect, combined with a significant heavy atom effect, exhibits excellent ROS generation capability under low-power white light (60 mW·cm–2) irradiation, and this has been demonstrated by a variety of specific indicators. The high efficiency of ROS generation enables R-Gd3 to rapidly photocatalyze the degradation of a variety of organic pollutants. Its degradation rates for methylene blue (MB), crystal violet (CV), rhodamine B (RhB), and norfloxacin (NFX) reached 58.9%, 73.34%, 71.92%, and 53.14%, respectively, which were 12.2, 16.2, 20.8, and 8.5 times higher than those of the control group.