A facile and green strategy to obtain organic room-temperature phosphorescence from natural lignin

Seeking pure organic functional luminescent materials that are processed from green, low-cost, and sustainable resources remains a challenging but beneficial task. As an abundant natural polymer composed of crosslinked phenol ether units, lignin is a potential source of organic luminescent material because of the presence of extensive aromatic fragments. In the present work, a remarkable afterglow involving room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) was achieved via simply embedding alkalized lignin into polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) matrix, and an ultralong luminescence lifetime of more than 160 ms was observed. More importantly, our study revealed that small fragments of hydrolyzed lignin (named LA-H) bearing extensive phenolic oxygen anions were the effective luminescent species. When embedded into a PVA matrix, LA-H showed remarkably high luminescence quantum yield and long lifetime of RTP emission compared with those of unprocessed lignin. Additionally, the various phenol oxygen anion moieties endowed LA-H with an excitation-dependent characteristic: the color-tunable RTP could be simply tuned from a maximum emission wavelength of 434–532 nm via altering the excitation wavelength. Thus, the color-tunable afterglow of emissive LA-H could be facilely obtained with a yield up to 38.4% using simple acid hydrolysis of lignin without other complex synthesis procedures. This work opens new avenues in the large-scale preparation of low-cost and sustainable pure organic RTP materials.