The Brightest Fluorescent Materials Ever Made

So, the team developed a solution to the problem based on keeping the fluorescent molecules apart. They took a colourless solution of macrocycle molecules called cyanostars, and mixed them with the fluorescent dye.

This use of macrocycles - a large class of ring-shaped molecules - isn't a new idea, and others have tried it before. But the big difference is that these earlier attempts used coloured macrocycles.

As their new solution dried, it formed what the team called small-molecule ionic isolation lattices (SMILES) that effectively kept the dye molecules compartmentalised apart from each other, preventing them from interacting, and preserving their optical properties with high fidelity.

This material can then be taken in several directions. It can be grown into crystals; it can form a dry powder; or it can be incorporated directly into polymers. The researchers found it worked perfectly with several commercially available fluorescent dyes, which, they said in their paper,  "mark these materials as plug and play".

But there's still work to be done before we're at that point. The first step was developing the material. Now the team has to study it.

"These materials are totally new, so we do not know which of their innate properties are actually going to offer superior functionality," Flood said. "We also do not know the materials' limits.

The research has been published in Cell Press.