Room temperature, long afterglow, water-soluble materials with multicolor tunability

Abstract

Developing solution-processable room-temperature long afterglow (RTLA) materials with multi-color tunable emissions based on an inorganic matrix is of considerable practical importance in diverse applications but rarely reported. Herein, a series of water-soluble multicolor afterglow materials (t@LP@Rh123, t@LP@Rh6G, t@LP@RhB, respectively) with afterglow emission colors of green, orange-yellow and red were achieved through triplet-to-singlet Förster-resonance energy transfer (T1-S1 FRET), where the cyan afterglow material t@LP obtained by solventless mechanical grinding method of 4-[2,2':6′,2″-Terpyridin]-4′-ylbenzoic acid and Laponite (LP) was used as an energy donor, and fluorescent dyes Rhodamine 123, Rhodamine 6G and Rhodamine B were used as energy acceptors. Notably, the obtained series of multicolor afterglow materials still exhibit obvious afterglow emission in aqueous solution, which make them potentially useful in the fields of anti-counterfeiting and multilevel information encryption.