Color-Tunable, Excitation-Dependent, and Time-Dependent Afterglows from Pure Organic Amorphous Polymers

Achieving persistent room-temperature phosphorescence (p-RTP), particularly those of tunable full-colors, from pure organic amorphous polymers is attractive but challenging. Particularly, those with tunable multicolorp-RTP in response to excitation wavelength and time are highly important but both fundamentally and technically underexplored. Here, a facile and general strategy toward color-tunablep-RTP from blue to orange-red based on amidation grafting of luminophores onto sodium alginate (SA) chains, resulting in amorphous polymers with distinctp-RTP and even impressively excitation-dependent and time-dependent afterglows is reported.p-RTP is associated with the unique semi-rigidified SA chains, effective hydrogen bonding network, and oxygen barrier properties of SA, whereas excitation-dependent and time-dependent afterglows should stem from the formation of diversifiedp-RTP emissive species with comparable but different lifetimes. These results outline a rational strategy toward amorphous smart luminophores with colorful, excitation-dependent, and time-dependentp-RTP, excellent solution processability, and film-forming ability for versatile applications.