Dynamically responsive photonic metal–organic frameworks

Different from single and static photonic materials, dynamically responsive materials possess numerous advantages, such as being multifunctional, dynamically responsive, and able to provide multiple channels within spatially limited platforms, thus exhibiting great potential for application in the color-on-demand areas, including imaging, optical displays, anticounterfeiting, and encoding. Photonic functional metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), with highly designable framework structures and varieties of optical functional building units, possess broad research and application prospects in the field of photonics, which make it possible to design a promising platform with multifunctional and integrated photonic performance. In this review, beyond the preparation strategies of stimuli-responsive photonic MOFs, we also summarize the stimuli-responsive photonic MOFs regarding several most representative types of external stimuli (such as light, gas, pressure, and polarization). As shown, external stimulation endows the stimuli-responsive photonic MOFs with intriguing regulatable photonic properties: intensive and tunable emission, multiphoton-excitable luminescence, nonlinear optical, circularly polarized luminescence, lasing, etc. Furthermore, their advanced representative applications, such as information encryption and anticounterfeiting display, biological imaging, chemosensing, and others, are also reviewed. The challenges are proposed and the prospects are addressed.