White polymer light-emitting devices (WPLEDs) have become a field of immense interest in both scientific and industrial communities. They have unique advantages such as low cost, light weight, ease of device fabrication, and large area manufacturing. Applications of WPLEDs for solid-state lighting are of special interest because about 20% of the generated electricity on the earth is consumed by lighting. To date, incandescent light bulbs (with a typical power efficiency of 12-17 lm W-1) and fluorescent lamps (about 40-70 lm W-1) are the most widely used lighting sources. However, incandescent light bulbs convert 90% of their consumed power into heat while fluorescent lamps contain a small but significant amount of toxic mercury in the tube, which complicates an environmentally friendly disposal. Remarkably, the device performances of WPLEDs have recently been demonstrated to be as efficient as those of fluorescent lamps.Here, we summarize the recent advances in WPLEDs with special attention paid to the design of novel luminescent dopants and device structures. Such advancements minimize the gap (for both efficiency and stability) from other lighting sources such as fluorescent lamps, light-emitting diodes based on inorganic semiconductors, and vacuum-deposited small-molecular devices, thus rendering WPLEDs equally competitive as these counterparts currently in use for illumination purposes.

Recently, lead halide perovskites with outstanding emission performance have become new candidate materials for light-emitting devices and displays; however, the toxicity of lead and instability of halide perovskites remain significant challenges. Herein, we report the aqueous acid-based synthesis of highly emissive two-dimensional (2D) tin halide perovskites, (octylammonium)2SnX4 (X = Br, I, or mixtures thereof), which displayed a high absolute photoluminescence (PL) quantum yield of near-unity in the solid-state, PL emission centered at 600 nm with a broad bandwidth (136 nm), a large Stokes shift (250 nm), long-lived luminescence (tau = 3.3 mus), and zero overlap between their absorption and emission spectra. Significantly, the stability study of 2D tin halide perovskites monitored by the PL quantum yield showed no changes after 240 days of storage at room temperature under ambient air and humidity conditions. The PL emission of the 2D tin halide perovskites was tuned from yellow to deep red by controlling halide composition. Furthermore, new yellow phosphors with superior optical properties are used to fabricate UV pumped white light emitting diodes (WLEDs). We expect these results to facilitate the development of new environmentally friendly and high-performance phosphors for future lighting and display technologies.

We discover a rare bluish white-light-emitting Sb3+-based coordination polymer with an unusually large Stokes shift of 230 nm (2.3 eV), ascribed to the assymetric-symmetric coordination shift of the Sb3+ centers. The photoemission renders both a high photoluminescence quantum yield exceeding 30% and a large full width at half maximum of 116 nm. Moreover, the strongly light-emissive material exhibits a linear relationship between the correlated color temperature and the absolute temperature in a wide range (157-457 K), thus presenting the first solid-state luminescent thermometer based on photoemission energy.

A new pi-chromophoric and asymmetric bola-amphiphilic oligo-( p-phenylene ethynylene)-based tetracarboxylate (OPE-TC1) linker was designed, synthesized, and self-assembled with Zn(OAc)2. The resulting nanoscale metal-organic framework (MOF) {Zn2(OPE-TC1)} n (NMOF-1) showed a vesicular morphology and permanent porosity with omniphilic pore surface. NMOF-1 showed cyan emission with high quantum efficiency (49%). The omniphilicity of the pore was utilized to incorporate ambipolar dye sulforhodamine G (SRG) to tune the band gap as well as to get pure white-light emission. Furthermore, the polar pore surface of NMOF-1 allowed facile diffusion of the substrate for efficient photocatalytic activity. The dye-encapsulated framework further showed enhanced dihydrogen production by 1.75-fold compared to that from the as-synthesized NMOF-1 because of the modulated band gap and high excited state lifetime. As a control experiment, we have synthesized a MOF (MOF-OMe) with an OPE-TC2 linker having -OMe functional groups that did not show nanoscale architecture. This suggested the important role of unsymmetrical bola-amphiphilicity in nanostructuring. This rational design of a chromophoric linker resulted in a nanoscale MOF with omniphilic porosity to achieve bimodal functionality in clean energy applications.

A dye@metal-organic framework (MOF) hybrid was used as a fluorophore in a white-light-emitting diode (WLED) for fast visible-light communication (VLC). The white light was generated from a combination of blue emission of the 9,10-dibenzoate anthracene (DBA) linkers and yellow emission of the encapsulated Rhodamine B molecules. The MOF structure not only prevents dye molecules from aggregation-induced quenching but also efficiently transfers energy to the dye for dual emission. This light-emitting material shows emission lifetimes of 1.8 and 5.3 ns for the blue and yellow components, respectively, which are significantly shorter than the 200 ns lifetime of Y3Al5O12:Ce(3+) in commercial WLEDs. The MOF-WLED device exhibited a modulating frequency of 3.6 MHz for VLC, six times that of commercial WLEDs.

Long-lived luminescent metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention due to their structural tunability and potential applications in sensing, biological imaging, security systems, and logical gates. Currently, the long-lived luminescence emission of such inorganic-organic hybrids is dominantly confined to short-wavelength regions. The long-wavelength long-lived luminescence emission, however, has been rarely reported for MOFs. In this work, a series of structurally stable long-wavelength long-lived luminescent MOFs have been successfully synthesized by encapsulating different dyes into the green phosphorescent MOFs Cd(m-BDC)(BIM). The multicolor long-wavelength long-lived luminescence emissions (ranging from green to red) in dye-encapsulated MOFs are achieved by the MOF-to-dye phosphorescence energy transfer. Furthermore, the promising optical properties of these novel long-lived luminescent MOFs allow them to be used as ink pads for advanced anticounterfeiting stamps. Therefore, this work not only offers a facile way to develop new types of multicolor long-lived luminescent materials but also provides a reference for the development of advanced long-lived luminescent anticounterfeiting materials.