Lanthanide-doped heterostructured nanocomposites toward advanced optical anti-counterfeiting and information storage

Abstract

The continuously growing importance of information storage, transmission, and authentication impose many new demands and challenges for modern nano-photonic materials and information storage technologies, both in security and storage capacity. Recently, luminescent lanthanide-doped nanomaterials have drawn much attention in this field because of their photostability, multimodal/multicolor/narrowband emissions, and long luminescence lifetime. Here, we report a multimodal nanocomposite composed of lanthanide-doped upconverting nanoparticle and EuSe semiconductor, which was constructed by utilizing a cation exchange strategy. The nanocomposite can emit blue and white light under 365 and 394 nm excitation, respectively. Meanwhile, the nanocomposites show different colors under 980 nm laser excitation when the content of Tb3+ ions is changed in the upconversion nanoparticles. Moreover, the time-gating technology is used to filter the upconversion emission of a long lifetime from Tb3+ or Eu3+, and the possibilities for modulating the emission color of the nanocomposites are further expanded. Based on the advantage of multiple tunable luminescence, the nanocomposites are designed as optical modules to load optical information. This work enables multi-dimensional storage of information and provides new insights into the design and fabrication of next-generation storage materials.

Next generation lanthanide doped nanoscintillators and photon converters

“…13c) [181]. Considering the UC and DS fluoride nanosystems show promising application in information encryption and encoding [201,202], the combination of XEOL, XEPL, UC and DS may greatly improve the security level.…”

High-level information encryption based on optical nanomaterials with multi-mode luminescence and dual-mode reading

“…[1][2][3] Along with the development of optical materials, diverse luminescent materials, such as those that exhibit down-conversion luminescence (DCL), 4 up-conversion luminescence (UCL), 5 and per-sistent luminescence (PersL), [6][7][8][9] have been developed and have found application in the field of information security. [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] However, a single luminescence mode is usually insufficient to meet the demands of high-level information security and is easily imitated. 19,20 To improve the security of anti-counterfeiting applications, various luminescent materials with dual-or multi-luminescence modes, in which light of different colors is emitted upon excitation with different types of stimulation, have been developed.…”

“…1–3 Along with the development of optical materials, diverse luminescent materials, such as those that exhibit down-conversion luminescence (DCL), 4 up-conversion luminescence (UCL), 5 and persistent luminescence (PersL), 6–9 have been developed and have found application in the field of information security. 10–18 However, a single luminescence mode is usually insufficient to meet the demands of high-level information security and is easily imitated. 19,20…”

Special Issue: Rare earth luminescent materials

“…One such field is optical information storage. A brand new optical storage medium composed of UCNPs and EuSe semiconductors was prepared by Xie and coworkers 22 , in which the emission spectrum was excitation wavelength dependent. The long lifetime upconversion emission was filtered by time-gating technology, and the possibilities for modulating the emission colors of the nanocomposites were further expanded.…”