Dynamic Photoresponsive Ultralong Phosphorescence from One-Dimensional Halide Microrods Toward Multilevel Information Storage

Ultralong room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) has drawn much attention in fields such as optical imaging, sensors, information security, and so on. To meet the need for intelligent systems, the development of photoresponsive ultralong RTP materials is highly desirable; however, it remains a challenge due to the lack of rational design strategies that can leverage RTP and photochromism effectively. Herein, we report a new type of one-dimensional (1D) metal-organic halides (MOHs) that simultaneously exhibited dynamic ultralong RTP and photochromic optical waveguide with a large switching ratio, obvious visualization contrast, and robust reversibility. These properties facilitate future applications for multicolor photonic barcodes and optical logic gates. Moreover, benefiting from the color-time-space multidimensional tunable ultralong RTP, this 1D microrod displayed a multimode luminescent signal output, with significantly higher information storage capacity than typical fluorescent systems. Therefore, this work demonstrates a new 1D color-tunable optical waveguide and photoresponsive ultralong RTP based on molecular self-assembly of MOHs and extends frontier photonic applications as multilevel data encryption and information storage at the micro/nanoscale.