In this review, we summarize recent advances in establishing persistently luminescent materials from the view of examining experimental and theoretical approaches to room-temperature phosphorescence and thermally-activated delayed fluorescence.

Tuning and controlling the luminescent properties of molecular materials by changing the orientation and arrangement of the fluorophores within a solid has played an important role in realizing multi-color emission. The formation of polymorphs and multi-component molecular solids have attracted considerable interest as new ways of achieving controllable luminescence and other photophysical properties for application in the next generation of photofunctional materials. In this article, recent advances in the synthesis of fluorescent polymorphs and multi-component materials and potential photo-related applications of the resulting materials are described. We first review the methods of preparation of polymorphs with tunable static luminescence, and the switching of the dynamic luminescence between polymorphs for potential sensor applications is also introduced. Attention is then focused on the supramolecular design (making use of hydrogen bonding and halogen bonding interactions) and methods of fabrication of multi-component molecular solids, and their color-tunable fluorescence and phosphorescence together with their stimuli-responsive properties for use as sensors. The use of density functional theory to study intramolecular and intermolecular energy transfer as well as the electronic structures of multi-component molecular solids is also outlined. Finally, we briefly discuss perspectives for the further development of these luminescent molecular solid-state materials.

Luminescent metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have received much attention due to their wide structural tunability and potential application in light-emitting diodes, biological imaging and chemical sensors. However, successful examples of long-persistent afterglow MOFs are still quite limited to date. In this work, we report that two types of Zn-terephthalate (TPA) MOFs (namely [Zn(TPA)(DMF)] (1-DMF) and MOF-5) could exhibit an obvious room-temperature afterglow emission with a time-resolved luminescence lifetime as high as 0.47 seconds. The phosphorescence-based afterglow was also highly sensitive to the temperature, and the reversible emission intensity could be recycled under high/low temperatures. Moreover, both 1-DMF and MOF-5 showed highly tunable afterglow phosphorescence colors (from cyan to yellow and from green to red, respectively) upon treatment with pyridine solution. The fluorescence/phosphorescence emission color of MOF-5 can be reversibly switched due to the addition and removal of a pyridine guest to and from the host nanochannel, as shown in both experimental and computational studies. Therefore, this work not only shows a facile method to develop MOF-based long-afterglow materials at room temperature, but also presents a strategy to tune their phosphorescence in a wide range based on host–guest interactions.