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Optical silicon (Si)-based materials are highly attractive due to their widespread applications ranging from electronics to biomedicine. It is worth noting that while extensive efforts have been devoted to developing fluorescent Si-based structures, there currently exist no examples of Si-based materials featuring phosphorescence emission, severely limiting Si-based wide-ranging optical applications. To address this critical issue, we herein introduce a kind of Si-based material, in which metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are in-situ growing on the surface of Si nanoparticles (SiNPs) assisted by microwave irradiation. Of particular significance, the resultant materials, i.e., MOFs-encapsulated SiNPs (MOFs@SiNPs) could exhibit pH-responsive fluorescence, whose maximum emission wavelength is red-shifted from 442 to 592 nm when the pH increases from 2 to 13. More importantly, distinct room-temperature phosphorescence (maximum emission wavelength: 505 nm) could be observed in this system, with long lifetime of 215 ms. Taking advantages of above-mentioned unique optical properties, the MOFs@SiNPs are further employed as high-quality anti-counterfeiting inks for advanced encryption. In comparison to conventional fluorescence anti-counterfeiting techniques (static fluorescence outputs are generally used, thus being easily duplicated and leading to counterfeiting risk), pH-responsive fluorescence and room-temperature phosphorescence of the resultant MOFs@SiNPs-based ink could offer advanced multi-modal security, which is therefore capable of realizing higher-level information security against counterfeiting.

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Publication history
Copyright
Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 22 December 2019
Revised: 28 March 2020
Accepted: 28 March 2020
Published: 14 May 2020
Issue date: June 2020

Copyright

© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020

Acknowledgements

We appreciate financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21825402, 31400860, 21575096, and 21605109), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (Nos. BK20191417 and BK20170061) and the Program for Jiangsu Specially-Appointed Professors to Prof. Yao He, a project funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD), 111 Project as well as Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology (NANO-CIC).

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