Dual-stimuli responsive photonic barcodes based on perovskite quantum dots encapsulated in whispering-gallery-mode microspheres

Micro/nanoscale photonic barcodes hold great potential for broad applications in items tracking, mul-tiplexed bioassays and anti-counterfeiting. The ever-increasing demand in advanced anti-counterfeiting applications calls for micro/nanoscale barcodes with accurate recognition, large encoding capacity and high security level. Here, we proposed a strategy to construct the dual-stimuli responsive photonic barcodes based on the perovskite quantum dots (PQDs) doped polymer whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microcavities via swelling-deswelling method. Benefiting from the well-defined spherical microcavities, the photoluminescence (PL) spectra of as-prepared composites exhibit a series of sharp peaks characteristics resulting from the effective WGM modulation, which constitutes the fingerprint of a specific resonator and thus allows a definition of photonic barcodes. On this basis, we achieved responsive photonic barcodes based on the volatile polar-solvent-controlled luminescence in the mi-crospheres benefitting from the space-confined microcavities and the ionic feature of the PQDs. More -over, the light-controlled photonic barcodes have further been acquired through reversibly regulating the inactivation and activation of the energy transfer (ET) process between the PQDs and photochromic dyes. The well-established protocols of PQDs@WGM enable the development of distinct responsive barcodes with multi-responsive features, which will pave an avenue to new types of flexible WGM-based components for optical data recording and security labels.(c) 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of The Chinese Ceramic Society. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

In this study, a strategy for constructing dual-stimuli responsive photonic barcodes based on perovskite quantum dots (PQDs) doped polymer whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microcavities was proposed. The photonic barcodes with multi-responsive features were achieved, which opens up a new avenue for flexible WGM-based components for optical data recording and security labels.