Color‐Tunable, Excitation‐Dependent, and Time‐Dependent Afterglows from Pure Organic Amorphous Polymers
Xueyu Dou, Tianwen Zhu, Zhengshuo Wang, Wei Sun, Yueying Lai, Kunyan Sui, Yeqiang Tan, Yongming Zhang, Wang Zhang Yuan
Abstract
Achieving persistent room-temperature phosphorescence (p-RTP), particularly those of tunable full-colors, from pure organic amorphous polymers is attractive but challenging. Particularly, those with tunable multicolor p-RTP in response to excitation wavelength and time are highly important but both fundamentally and technically underexplored. Here, a facile and general strategy toward color-tunable p-RTP from blue to orange-red based on amidation grafting of luminophores onto sodium alginate (SA) chains, resulting in amorphous polymers with distinct p-RTP and even impressively excitation-dependent and time-dependent afterglows is reported. p-RTP is associated with the unique semi-rigidified SA chains, effective hydrogen bonding network, and oxygen barrier properties of SA, whereas excitation-dependent and time-dependent afterglows should stem from the formation of diversified p-RTP emissive species with comparable but different lifetimes. These results outline a rational strategy toward amorphous smart luminophores with colorful, excitation-dependent, and time-dependent p-RTP, excellent solution processability, and film-forming ability for versatile applications.