Dual-Mode, Color-Tunable, Lanthanide-Doped Core-Shell Nanoarchitectures for Anti-Counterfeiting Inks and Latent Fingerprint Recognition.

With the rapid development of information in modern society, the research and development of advanced anti-counterfeiting technology is becoming more and more important to protect the security and comprehensiveness of information. Therefore, fluorescent ink as an anti-counterfeiting technology and fingerprint recognition technology as a ″human information identification card″ has attracted the attention of many research groups. Herein, dual-mode (upconversion and downconversion) lanthanide-doped luminescent nanoarchitectures were developed using Y2O3:Er3+,Yb3+ nanoparticles as a core and layered lanthanide hydroxides nanomaterials as a shell. Under the irradiation of 980 nm near-infrared light, the nanoarchitectures emitted a bright upconverted red light emission. Meanwhile, under the irradiation of 254 nm UV light, the nanoarchitectures can directly emit multicolor luminescence (from green to yellow-green, yellow, orange, and red) by changing the suitable ratios of Tb3+/Eu3+ ions. The information can only be extracted when the irradiation of two kinds of excitation light sources existed at the same time, which can improve the difficulty of illegal imitation and enhance the level of anti-counterfeiting. Furthermore, these luminescent nanoarchitectures were investigated for visual latent fingerprint recognition on various substrates with high definition, high sensitivity, and high anti-interference. These results indicated that the nanoarchitectures reported in this study may have great application prospects in information security and identity recognition.