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Ultrastable and colorful afterglow from organic luminophores in amorphous nanocomposites: advanced anti-counterfeiting and in vivo imaging application

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Abstract

Special attention has been paid to the organic afterglow materials (OAM) for their fascinating properties. However, poor stability at air and complicated structure design hinder the development of OAM. Herein, sol-gel, a facile and simple technique, is employed to synthesize a series of organic/inorganic hybrid nanocomposites (N1/SiO2, N2/SiO2, and N3/SiO2) by covalently linking three common aryl imides with crosslinked silica skeleton. These nanomaterials show excitation wavelength-dependent and colorful (yellow, red and green) afterglow of organic imides with long lifetime up to 1.1 s at air. Interestingly, the ultralong phosphorescence is ultrastable under various conditions: water, high temperature, UV irradiation and in vivo, due to the protection of inorganic silica. In particularly, heating to 500 °C does not quench the afterglow of organic luminophore in nanocomposites, but forms new ultralong phosphorescence originated from space-conjugation of silica and carbonyl. The afterglow nanomaterials display huge advantages in the applications of advanced anti-counterfeiting and bioimaging.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21374017, 21574021 and 51873092), and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province (No. 2017J01684).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fujian Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials, College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, 350007, China

    Qiuqin Huang, Shuming Yang & Zhenghuan Lin

  2. State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Key Laboratory of Bioactive Materials, Ministry of Education, and College of Life Sciences, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China

    Heqi Gao & Dan Ding

  3. Fujian provincial Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials Oriented Chemical Engineering, Fuzhou, 350007, China

    Qidan Ling

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  1. Qiuqin Huang
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Correspondence to Dan Ding or Zhenghuan Lin.

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Ultrastable and colorful afterglow from organic luminophores in amorphous nanocomposites: advanced anti-counterfeiting and in vivo imaging application

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Huang, Q., Gao, H., Yang, S. et al. Ultrastable and colorful afterglow from organic luminophores in amorphous nanocomposites: advanced anti-counterfeiting and in vivo imaging application. Nano Res. 13, 1035–1043 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2740-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-020-2740-x

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