Confining chromophores by polymer conformation rigidification for room-temperature phosphorescence hydrogels

Abstract

Organic room-temperature phosphorescent (RTP) materials have played an important role in many emerging photonic applications, such as flexible electronics, bioimaging, and information anti-counterfeiting encryption, due to their excellent properties of large Stokes shift and long lifetime. However, RTP emission of polymer materials requires the restriction of rigid chemical environment, which greatly limits their applications in dry state that usually have poor stretchability. Polymeric RTP hydrogels offer excellent soft wet feature and tunable mechanical properties, providing an ideal solution to address the above challenge. Various preparation strategies have been developed to achieve RTP emission by confining chromophores through polymer conformation rigidification, such as physical doping, chemical grafting, and supramolecular polymerization. This review aims to systematically summarize recent progress in this young but flourishing research area. Subsequently, the application fields of polymeric RTP hydrogels are briefly reviewed. The current challenges and future outlooks of this field are also discussed to attract new interest and inspire more efforts.