A facile co-crystallization approach to fabricate two-component carbon dot composites showing time-dependent evolutive room temperature phosphorescence colors

Time-dependent evolutive afterglow materials can increase the security level by providing additional encryption modes in anti-counterfeiting and data encryption. The design of carbon-based materials with dynamic afterglow colors is attractive but formidably challenging. In this study, a facile two-component co-crystallization strategy is designed for the first time to obtain N,S-co-doped carbon dots@isophthalic acid (CDs@IPA) and N,S-co-doped carbon dots@melamine (CDs@MA). CDs@IPA and CDs@MA all exhibiting time-dependent evolutive RTP colors from orange via yellow to green over 1 s, especially that the green afterglow time of CDs@IPA can reach 6 s (τavg = 582 ms). Studies show that the time-dependent RTP colors originated from two primary emissive centers, low-energy emission of CDs and high-energy emission of host matrix activated by CDs. Due to their distinguishable RTP colors with differentiated lifetimes, the ratios of two RTP emissive bands changed with time during the decay process, resulting in the continuous RTP colors variation in real-time. This two-component carbon dot-based co-crystallization strategy may open a new avenue for the development of time-dependent afterglow color materials.