Recently, a research team from the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and State Key Laboratory of Organic Electronics and Information Displays, made new progress in the field of organic room temperature phosphorescent elastic materials. By incorporating organic room temperature phosphorescent polymers and polyvinyl alcohol into a polydimethylsiloxane matrix, they prepared full-color organic room temperature phosphorescent stretchable elastomers and explored their applications in optical displays and anti-counterfeiting. On August 10th, related results were published in the international academic journal Nature Communications under the title Full-color persistent room temperature phosphorescent elastomers with robust optical properties. Prof. Wei Huang, Prof. Qiang Zhao and Prof. Yun Ma are co-corresponding authors, and Dr. Juan Wei is the first author.
Organic room temperature phosphorescent materials that can be reversibly stretched under external force and have excellent optical/mechanical properties have huge application potential in the fields of flexible electronics and photonics. At present, doping small molecule phosphorescent crystals into polyvinyl alcohol or polymethyl methacrylate matrices can produce organic room temperature phosphorescent materials with good flexibility and large area. However, the above materials are prone to crystal fracture or rupture under stress, and the phosphorescent intensity and emission lifetime decrease significantly or even quenched, hindering their application in the field of flexible optoelectronics. Therefore, developing organic room temperature phosphorescent elastic materials with excellent mechanical properties and stable optical properties still faces tremendous challenges.
To address this issue, this research team incorporated organic room temperature phosphorescent polymers with polyvinyl alcohol into a polydimethylsiloxane matrix to prepare a series of full-color organic room temperature phosphorescent elastic materials. The amino and positively charged quaternary phosphonium groups in the organic room temperature phosphorescent polymers, the hydroxyl groups in polyvinyl alcohol, and the ether bonds in polydimethylsiloxane can interact through hydrogen bonding, ionic interactions, dipole-dipole interactions, etc., thus endowing good mechanical properties/room temperature phosphorescence to the prepared elastomers. Even when the elastomers are under mutiple cyclic strain, the strained region still exhibits excellent room temperature phosphorescence. The team explored the application of such elastic materials in optical displays and anti-counterfeiting. This research is of great significance in guiding the development of organic room temperature phosphorescent elastic materials, and will promote breakthrough progress of such materials in fields like wearable optoelectronics, flexible displays, and advanced anti-counterfeiting.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Key R&D Program of China.
（Written by: Ma Yun Checked by: Zhao Yunyu, Yi Mingdong Editor: Wang Cunhong Reviewer: Zhang Feng）
