Under 978 nm near infrared (NIR) excitation, ultraviolet (UV) upconversion (UC) emissions from Pb 2+ ions in With the development of manufacturing technology for nanometer materials, UCL labelling has gathered great attention.8-11 The study on UCL was derived from the detection of IR light; however, it has a great number of potential applications in the elds of solid-state lasers, 3D displays, IR quantum counters, optical probes in uorescent imaging techniques, anti-counterfeiting, NIR photocatalysis, and temperature sensors. 6,7,9,10,[12][13][14][15] Most of UC materials are rareearth doped solid compounds; in which, a lanthanide ion absorbs more than one photon with lower energy and converts them to one photon with higher energy by using its metastable energy levels. Yb 3+ ion has been extensively adopted as a sensitizer in UC processes because it has a long excited state lifetime and a relatively large absorption cross-section in the NIR region. ion from the view of energy. Cooperative transition usually means the physical processes in which identical ions or atoms simultaneously make transitions by absorbing (or emitting) one photon with the sum of all transition energies, or transferring their energies to another ion or atom. Cooperative transition includes cooperative luminescence (CL), cooperative absorption (CA), and cooperative energy transfer (CET) and is closely relative to clustered lanthanide ions in solid hosts. Clusters made of lanthanide ions can easily form in many materials, especially in alkaline-earth uoride crystal AF 2 (A ¼ Ca, Sr, Ba). When a lanthanide ion with +3 oxidation state is doped in an alkaline-earth uoride, nonequilibrium of charge arises in the lattice due to the lanthanide ion usually occupy the position of an alkaline-earth ion with +2 oxidation state. The non-equilibrium of charge produces crystal defects such as the interstitials of F À ions and cation vacancies in order to compensate excess plus charges, which gives non-uniform distribution of lanthanide ions.