Rational Design of Dual-Mode Emitting Carbon Dots to Exploit the Synergistic Effect of Matrices for High-Efficiency WLEDs and Anti-Counterfeiting

Long-lived room-temperature phosphorescence (RTP) materials have been widely applied in various fields. However, achieving high-performance carbon dots (CDs) RTP remains a great challenge. Here, a facile synthetic strategy is rationally designed for the synthesis of high-performance dual-mode emitting CDs by constructing rigid structures through the synergistic effect of the matrices. The obtained CD RTP powder possesses an ultrahigh photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 70.7%, a phosphorescence lifetime of about 0.45 s, and an afterglow that lasts for 15 s to the naked eyes. Most importantly, the prepared CD RTP powder can be utilized as a commercial phosphor powder for the fabrication of a high-performance white lighting-emitting diode (WLED) with a CIE coordinate of (0.39, 0.39), a high color rendering index of 93.6, and a color temperature of 3805 K for warm WLED. Especially the luminous efficiency of the fabricated WLED can reach up to 66.89 lm W-1, which is much higher than the values reported for most CDs-based WLED devices. Additionally, CD RTP can be applied to advanced invisible inks for information encryption due to its excellent water solubility and can also be exploited for advanced information anti-counterfeiting by utilizing phosphorescent properties.