Strong IR‐Luminescence Single Cotton Fiber Doped by Yb 3+ Complexes for Hidden Photon Information
Xinze Yu, Junlei Wang, Ruiqi Zhang, Zhonglin Du, Wenfei Shen, Qiao Wang, Yao Wang, Jun Li, Soo Wohn Lee, Laurence A. Belfiore, Jianguo TangABSTRACT
The infrared luminescence is easily quenched by polar groups or compounds in the vicinity domain around emitting centers. Thus, natural cotton fibers (NCFs) were thought as unavailable to be substrate for this purpose due to their rich hydroxyl groups. To address this critical problem, this article focused on Yb 3+ ‐complexes as the infrared‐emitting central element to reconstruct the surficial layer of natural cotton fibers for obtaining strong infrared (IR) luminescent cotton fibers. Thus, the excellent IR property of NCFs can be used as invisible photon information fiber materials. In this work, Yb 3+ with its light‐energy antenna compounds (i.e., ligands) is as penetrant as to disperse in swollen cotton fibers and to be anchored at/in the surficial layer through drying‐caused shrinkage. The obtained hybrid fibers of Yb(HDNM) 3 bath have high luminescence intensity at a relative value of 1 200 000 a.u., high photon quantum yield at 1.43%, and a high lifetime of 8 µs. Thus, this work explored a new generation of infrared luminescence fibers that will potentially be applied for the hidden photon information fiber materials.