Abstract
Persistent luminescence, long-lived emission from inorganic or organic materials after the cessation of excitation, receives considerable attention in the field of optoelectronics. Despite great achievements in the past decades, the performance of organic materials still lags behind their inorganic counterparts, which have thousands of years of history. This is largely caused by the limited understanding of the mechanisms involved in organic materials. Here we report trap-induced persistent luminescence (TIP) in organic host–guest materials, with controllable trap depths from 0.11 to 0.56 eV and tunable afterglow emission at wavelengths from 507 to 669 nm via energy level engineering. The TIP phenomenon in a typical TN@TPBi film lasts for more than 24 h, with additional energy stored at room temperature for over 1 week. It is found that the trap depth in TIP is probably determined by the energy gap between the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals of the radical anions of the host and guest molecules, matching well with density functional theory calculations. TIP was also observed after electrical excitation, demonstrating the potential of exploiting the semiconductor features of the organic hosts. These results provide a fundamental principle to design metal-free organic emitters of persistent luminescence, thereby expanding their applications in fields such as medical delivery identification, semiconductor devices and imaging techniques.
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Data availability
Source data are provided with this paper. The remaining data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information files, and are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The data of Figs. 2–4 have been deposited as a dataset in the Dryad (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.5x69p8dbg)).
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. U2005212, 62288102, 51872247 and 52172156), the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2020YFA0709900), Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee (JCYJ20200109144614514), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. 2072020075) and the Open Research Fund Program of Collaborative Innovation Center for Molecular Imaging of Precision Medicine (2020-MS03).
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Contributions
C.L., Z.A., Y.Z. and R.-J.X. conceived the experiments. C.L., W.Y., J.X., H.S., B.Z., W.H., Z.A., Y.Z. and R.-J.X. prepared the paper. C.L., Z.W., J.L., S.Y. and Y.Z. were primarily responsible for the experiments. H.M. and A. L. contributed to DFT calculations. All authors contributed to the data analyses.
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Nature Photonics thanks Mei Pan, Dongpeng Yan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–24, Discussion and Tables 1–3.
Supplementary Video 1
TIP decay of TN@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 2
TIP decay of PPO@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 3
TIP decay of DT@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 4
TIP decay of NPBP@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 5
TIP decay of DN@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 6
TIP decay of TAQ@TPBi film.
Supplementary Video 7
TIP decay of TN@TMPyPB film.
Supplementary Video 8
TIP decay of TN@TPBi OLED.
Supplementary Video 9
TL decay of TN@TPBi OLED.
Source data
Source Data 2–4
Unprocessed source data used to generate Figs. 2–4.
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Lin, C., Wu, Z., Ma, H. et al. Charge trapping for controllable persistent luminescence in organics. Nat. Photon. 18, 350–356 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01396-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-024-01396-0
