Ionic-confining-assisted multiple-mode tunable light emitting of carbon nanodots

Multiple-mode light emitting in one material system is tremendous desirable for various applications. Herein, we have developed an ionic crystal confining strategy to prepare the carbon nanodots (CDs) with quadruple-mode light emitting and demonstrated their promising application in information anti-counterfeiting via optical logic gates. In detail, the quadruple-mode light emitting of CDs (QM-CDs) are prepared with the citric acid and urea with NaOH matrix via microwave-assisted polymerization. Mechanically, the high-density ionic bonds stemmed from the NaOH ionic-crystal can effectively inactivate nonradiative defect centers, stabilize triplet excitons, increase absorption cross-section and boost resonance energy transfer, evoking the outstanding solid-state fluorescence, upconversion photoluminescence (UCPL), phosphorescence, and chemiluminescence simultaneously. Meanwhile, the isolated NaOH matrix can promote the confining aggregation of CDs, leading to the redshifted emission wavelength and endowing the light emitting with tunable wavelength. With the excitability of logic functions between the light emitting and controlled excitation, the programmable multiple-inputs logic gates are established with the QM-CDs, enabling the application in high-throughput logical operations and information anti-counterfeiting. This research provides a new insight into the synthesize of multiple-mode luminescent CDs, and thus promote the applications of nanomaterials in intelligent encryption and anti-counterfeiting.