Achieving color-tunable persistent afterglow from ultralong polyacrylamide-based room-temperature phosphorescence materials through phosphorescence Förster resonance energy transfer

Abstract

Polymer-based pure organic room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) materials have received widespread attention due to their great application prospects in many fields. However, the reports about polymer-based multicolor RTP materials were still rare. Herein, a series of monochromatic PAM-based RTP materials are constructed by facilely doping boric acid derivatives into polyacrylamide (PAM) matrices. Due to the strong intermolecular hydrogen-bonding interaction, 4-carboxyphenylboronic acid (CPBA) doped system PAM/CPBA achieves an ultralong RTP lifetime of 753 ms with a naked-eye visible blue afterglow up to 12 s. Significantly, PAM/CPBA as energy donor and the commercial fluorescent dye fluorescein (FL) or rhodamine B (RhB) as energy acceptor are used to fabricated ternary doping systems to achieve multicolor afterglow emission through phosphorescence Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET). The afterglow colors of PAM/CPBA/FL and PAM/CPBA/RhB can be easily adjusted from blue to yellow or purple by changing the doping content of FL or RhB. Inspiringly, a nearly white afterglow emission from the quaternary doping system PAM/CPBA/RhB/FL is achieved by varying the amount of FL content. Furthermore, the prepared PAM-based binary and ternary doping RTP materials can be applied in the field of information encryption.