Fluorine-induced aggregate-interlocking for color-tunable organic afterglow with a simultaneously improved efficiency and lifetime

Designing organic afterglow materials with a high efficiency and long lifetime is highly attractive but challenging because of the inherent competition between the luminescence efficiency and lifetime. Here, we propose a simple yet efficient strategy, namely fluorine-induced aggregate-interlocking (FIAI), to realize both an enhanced efficiency and elongated lifetime of afterglow materials by stimulating the synergistic effects of the introduced fluorine atoms to efficiently promote intersystem crossing (ISC) and intermolecular non-covalent interactions for facilitating both the generation of triplet excitons and suppression of non-radiative decays. Thus, the fluorine-incorporated afterglow molecules exhibit greatly enhanced ISC with a rate constant up to 5.84 × 107 s-1 and suppressed non-radiative decay down to 0.89 s-1, resulting in efficient organic afterglow with a simultaneously improved efficiency up to 10.5% and a lifetime of 1.09 s. Moreover, accompanied by the efficient phosphorescence emission especially at cryogenic temperature, color-tunable afterglow was also observed at different temperatures. Therefore, tri-mode multiplexing encryption devices by combining lifetime, temperature and color, and visual temperature sensing were successfully established. The FIAI strategy by addressing fundamental issues of afterglow emission paves the way to develop high-performance organic afterglow materials, opening up a broad prospect of aggregated and excited state tuning of organic solids for emission lifetime-resolved applications.