Ultra-Broad-Temperature Mechanoluminescence Enabled by Intrinsic Lattice Disorder

Mechanoluminescent (ML) materials convert mechanical stimuli into light through carrier excitation and radiative recombination, enabling external-power-free stress sensing and visualization. The strict energy matching required for carrier release, transport, and recombination restricts ML to narrow thermal windows. Their application at extreme temperatures, however, is constrained by discrete defect levels arising from relatively uniform local atomic environments. Here, we use intrinsic lattice disorder to engineer a quasi-continuous trap landscape in Sr₃Gd₂(Ge₃O₉)₂:Mn²⁺. Diverse local crystal-field environments, together with dynamically generated defects, create energetically adjacent traps that support a trap-relay process. Charge carriers are continuously redistributed across this trap manifold, sustaining stable ML over an ultrabroad temperature range from 133 to 433 K. We further demonstrate a human-machine interaction system based on this material under simulated extreme-temperature conditions. These results establish intrinsic lattice disorder as a strategy for broadening the thermal operating window of ML materials and provide a general design principle for thermally robust, energy-storing luminescent materials for extreme environments.