Activating Room Temperature Long Afterglow of Carbon Dots via Covalent Fixation

The achievement of long afterglow in aqueous solution and as well as with small effects of dissolved oxygen is critical for its applications, but this is still a highly difficult and challenging task. Herein, a novel strategy for facilely preparing room temperature long afterglow material is reported via covalently fixing carbon dots (CDs) onto colloidal nanosilica (nSiO2). The as-obtained materials (named m-CDs@nSiO2) show not only an unexpected long afterglow emission in water dispersion (lifetime as high as 0.703 s) but also with small effects of the dissolved oxygen. Further studies revealed that the observed long afterglow of m-CDs@nSiO2 possesses a predominant delayed fluorescence nature and mixed with a portion of phosphorescence. Some key knowledge that can be concluded from this study are (i) covalent interaction could be employed as an option to fix and rigidify triplet emission species; (ii) covalent bonds fixation strategy could behave as a better alternative than that of the frequently used hydrogen/halogen bonds for stabilizing triplets, because this benefits in extending the occurrence of long afterglow from only solid to solution/dispersion forms; and (iii) the containing unsaturated bonds (e.g., C═C) on the surface of CDs make them to be self-protection agents from the usual quenching effects of oxygen to the triplets due to their capabilities of reaction with oxygen during the irradiation process. On the basis of the unique long afterglow features of m-CDs@nSiO2 in water dispersion and oxygen insensitivity, a moisture-related strategy for high-level information protection is proposed and demonstrated.