Laterally Engineering Lanthanide-MOFs Epitaxial Heterostructures for Spatially Resolved Planar 2D Photonic Barcoding

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Nanotechnology
• Chemistry

Background:

• Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) heterostructures offer tunable emissive colors for advanced applications.
• Existing methods for MOF heterostructure synthesis have limitations in precise control.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel strategy for constructing lateral lanthanide-MOF (Ln-MOF) epitaxial heterostructures.
• To achieve domain-controlled emissive colors for high-throughput sensing and information security applications.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a steric-hindrance effect to guide the epitaxial growth of Ln-MOF microrods.
• Introduced channel-directed guest molecules to control in-plane and out-of-plane growth rates.
• Employed a stepwise epitaxial growth procedure to create a library of lateral Ln-MOF heterostructures.

Main Results:

• Successfully constructed lateral Ln-MOF epitaxial heterostructures with controllable aspect ratios.
• Demonstrated rational modulation of emissive colors by doping specific lanthanide species into different domains.
• Achieved the definition of photonic barcodes in a 2D domain with significantly enhanced encoding capacity.

Conclusions:

• The proposed strategy provides molecular-level control over crystallite morphology for assembling multifunctional heterostructures.
• This work offers insights into using modulators for precise control in MOF synthesis.
• The developed Ln-MOF heterostructures show great potential for advanced sensing and anti-counterfeit technologies.