Precise control of energy migration between sensitizer ions and activator ions in lanthanide-doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) nowadays has been extensively investigated to achieve efficient photon upconversion. However, these UCNPs generally emit blue, green or red light only under fixed excitation conditions. In this work, regulation of the photon transition process between different energy levels of a single activator ion to obtain tunable upconversion fluorescence under different excitation conditions is achieved by introducing a modulator ion. The cross-relaxation process between modulator ion and activator ion can be controlled to generate tunable luminescence from the same lanthanide activator ion under excitation at different wavelengths or with different laser power density and pulse frequency. This strategy has been tested and proven effective in two different nanocrystal systems and its usefulness has been demonstrated for high-level optical encryption.
Sensitive and selective detection
of hypochlorite is in great demand
for food safety, especially in fresh cold chain products. However,
the detection limit of traditional visible emission-based strategies
cannot satisfy the requirement of ultrasensitive analysis in practical
applications. In this work, we explored a novel luminescent nanoprobe
in the near-infrared-II (NIR-II) window to greatly improve the hypochlorite
detection limit for analysis of real milk samples, which was based
on the fluorescence resonance energy-transfer process between the
hypochlorite-responsive dye (FD1080) and the lanthanide-doped downconverted
nanoparticles. Specifically, the NIR-II luminescence from Yb ions
was first suppressed by FD1080 due to the energy-transfer mechanism.
In the presence of hypochlorite, FD1080 was bleached to recover the
luminescence. As a proof-of-concept, the optimal nanoprobe exhibited
a linear luminescence recovery in the range of 0.1–1 nM with
the detection limit of 0.0295 nM for hypochlorite. Real milk sample
detection experiments showed that the probe had good accuracy and
precision.
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