Tunable Resonator-Upconverted Emission (TRUE) Color Printing and Applications in Optical Security

Lanthanide-doped nanophosphors are promising in anti-counterfeiting and security printing applications. These nanophosphors can be incorporated as transparent inks that fluoresce by upconverting near-infrared illumination into visible light to allow easy verification of documents. However, these inks typically exhibit a single luminescent color, low emission efficiency, and low print resolutions. Tunable resonator-upconverted emission (TRUE) is achieved by placing upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) within plasmonic nanoresonators. A range of TRUE colors are obtained from a single-UCNP species self-assembled within size-tuned gap-plasmon resonances in Al nanodisk arrays. The luminescence intensities are enhanced by two orders of magnitude through emission and absorption enhancements. The enhanced emissive and plasmonic colors are simultaneously employed to generate TRUE color prints that exhibit one appearance under ambient white light, and a multicolored luminescence appearance that is revealed under near-infrared excitation. The printed color and luminescent images are of ultrahigh resolutions (≈50 000 dpi), and enable multiple colors from a single excitation source for increased level of security.