Facile fabrication of Y4(1,2-BDC)6(H2O)2·5H2O:Eu3+,Tb3+ ultralong nanobelts and tunable luminescence properties

Abstract

Lanthanide-based coordination polymer yttrium 1,2-benzenebicarboxylate ultralong nanobelts have been successfully prepared through a simple and mild one-step approach on a large scale. Electron microscopy images show that the uniform nanobelts are about 100–150 nm in width, 20–40 nm in thickness and up to several hundreds of micrometers in length. The crystal structure of the obtained nanobelts belongs to the triclinic crystal system with space group P1. The exact chemical composition was obtained by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), elemental analysis, thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) and Fourier-transform infrared spectra (FT-IR). The ultralong nanobelts growth was explored by time-dependent experiments and a possible formation mechanism was proposed. The investigation of the luminescent properties reveals that the luminescence colors of yttrium 1,2-benzenebicarboxylate nanobelts co-doped with Tb³⁺ and Eu³⁺ ions under ultraviolet light can be tuned from green, through green–yellow and yellow, to red by changing the relative doping concentration of the activator ions. It is expected that the synthetic strategy can be used to prepare other nanoscale metal–organic frameworks.