Wide-Range Color-Tunable Ultralong Organic Phosphorescence Materials for Printable and Writable Security Inks.

Organic materials with long-lived, color-tunable phosphorescence are potentially used for optical recording, anti-counterfeiting, and bioimaging. Herein, we develop a series of novel host-guest organic phosphors allowing dynamic color tuning from the cyan (502 nm) to orange red (608 nm). Guest materials are employed to tune the phosphorescent color, while the host materials show a synergistic effect to the guest to activate the phosphorescence emission. These organic phosphors have an ultra-long lifetime of 0.7 s and a maximum phosphorescence efficiency of 18.2%. Although color tunable inks have already been developed using visible dyes, solution-processed security inks that are temperature dependent and display time-resolved printed images are unprecedented. This strategy can provide a crucial step towards the next-generation of security technologies for information handling.