Nanosecond-order long–short fluorescence lifetime switchable encryption with enlarged coding capacity

Abstract

The turn-off fluorescent photoswitches for information encryption are constantly being developed. However, there are no reports about time-switchable (fluorescence lifetime-switchable) encryption to overcome the limitations of tunable encoding numbers in spectrally and temporally encoded libraries. Based on the double-exponential fitting of fluorescence lifetime, we propose, a fatigue-free and highly flexible switch between the amplitude-weighted average fluorescence lifetime (τm) and the intensity-weighted average fluorescence lifetime (τi), which will realize the supermultiplexed fluorescence lifetime switchable encryption. The potentially enormous library of different fluorescent lifetime combinations would facilitate the development of information security.

Keywords

• anti-counterfeiting
• fluorescence lifetime
• optical multiplexing
• photo-switch
• time-switch