Ultralong-Lived Up-Conversional Room-Temperature Afterglow Materials with a Polyvinyl Alcohol Substrate

Room-temperature afterglow (RTA) materials have a wide range of applications in imaging, lighting, and therapy, due to their long lifetime and persistent luminescence after the light source is removed. Additionally, near-infrared light with low energy and a high penetration rate ensures its irreplaceable importance in imaging and therapy. Thus, it is vital to design RTA materials excited by NIR. In the present study, we select up-conversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) as the donor and add them into hybrids, obtained by dispersing coronene tetra-carboxylate salt (CS) into a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-substrate through a series of mixing methods. Through radiation energy transfer between the donor UCNPs and the acceptor CS, a kind of RTA film with a photoluminescence lifetime of more than 2 s under NIR excitation was successfully achieved, and these films could maintain persistent naked-eye-distinguishable luminescence after withdrawing the excitation light source. Furthermore, the films obtained from UCNP doping into CS/PVA hybrids were found to exhibit better RTA performance than those from smearing. This idea of up-conversion afterglow broadens the tuning and application scope for polymer-based luminescent materials.