Physical Manipulation of Lanthanide-Activated Photoluminescence

Versatile manipulation of lanthanide photoluminescence not only enables a more thorough understanding of the luminescent mechanism, but also promotes their widespread applications including advanced display and security, bioimaging and biotherapy, and sensors. The traditional chemical methods, engineering of composition, concentration, size, morphology, and surface defects, can easily tune the excitation, energy transfer and emission processes and have been frequently used. Despite the powerful ability to control luminescence intensity and selectivity, these chemical approaches suffer from cumbersome synthesis processes and are usually time consuming and irreversible. Recently, there have been numerous examples of physical approaches realizing in situ, real time, and reversible luminescence manipulation for certain materials under a given excitation. Herein, the existing physical strategies comprising temperature, magnetic field, electric field, and mechanical stress are summarized. For each approach, the action mechanism, material design, applications, as well as current challenges are discussed, and possible development directions and broadening of the potential application areas are considered.