Controllable and stepwise synthesis of soluble ladder-conjugated bis(perylene imide) fluorenebisimidazole as a multifunctional optoelectronic material.

By a controllable and stepwise strategy, a soluble ladder-conjugated perylene derivative BPI-FBI as the only product has been synthesized, which avoids the tough work to isolate regioisomers generated by a conventional one-step condensation method. BPI-FBI exhibits broad absorption spectra covering the whole visible region from 300 to 700 nm because of the large π-conjugation skeleton and has a low LUMO level inheriting the prototype PDI. In the steady-state space-charge-limited current (SCLC) devices, BPI-FBI exhibits an intrinsic electron mobility of 1.01 × 10(-5) cm(2) V(-1) s(-1). With a high two photon absorbing activity in the near-infrared region from 1200 to 1400 nm, BPI-FBI also exhibits good optical limiting performance, which will be useful for sensor or human eye protection and stabilization of light sources for optical communications.