DNA Inspirited Rational Construction of Nonconventional Luminophores with Efficient and Color-Tunable Afterglow

Persistent room-temperature phosphorescence (p-RTP) from pure organics is attractive due to its fundamental importance and potential applications in molecular imaging, sensing, encryption, anticounterfeiting, etc.1-4 Recently, efforts have been also made in obtaining color-tunable p-RTP in aromatic phosphors5 and nonconjugated polymers6,7. The origin of color-tunable p-RTP and the rational design of such luminogens, particularly those with explicit structure and molecular packing, remain challenging. Noteworthily, nonconventional luminophores without significant conjugations generally possess excitation-dependent photoluminescence (PL) because of the coexistence of diverse clustered chromophores6,8, which strongly implicates the possibility to achieve color-tunable p-RTP from their molecular crystals assisted by effective intermolecular interactions. Here, inspirited by the highly stable double-helix structure and multiple hydrogen bonds in DNA, we reported a series of nonconventional luminophores based on hydantoin (HA), which demonstrate excitation-dependent PL and color-tunable p-RTP from sky-blue to yellowish-green, accompanying unprecedentedly high PL and p-RTP efficiencies of up to 87.5% and 21.8%, respectively. Meanwhile, the p-RTP emissions are resistant to vigorous mechanical grinding, with lifetimes of up to 1.74 s. Such robust, color-tunable and highly efficient p-RTP render the luminophores promising for varying applications. These findings provide mechanism insights into the origin of color-tunable p-RTP, and surely advance the exploitation of efficient nonconventional luminophores.