Laterally Engineering Organic Light-Harvesting Monolithic Heterostructures for Spatially Resolved Photonic Barcodes

Organic heterostructures capable of emitting multicolor spectra have a wide range of important applications in materials tracking and information security. However, the construction of organic two-dimensional (2D) lateral heterostructures remains a great challenge for organic self-assembly. Here, we present a straightforward organic alloying strategy to construct the multicomponent 2D heterostructures using a substrate-assisted heteroepitaxial growth method. The resulting sectored monolithic heterostructures exhibit a 2D polychromatic architecture in which each spatial sector can be independently and effectively modulated. Various multicolor monolithic heterostructures with higher compositional and morphological diversity are further acquired through rational molecular design and a thermodynamic assembly process coupled with living epitaxial growth procedures, which allows for the definition of the planar photonic barcodes in a 2D domain with an improved security level. These results offer good opportunities to develop highly integrated multifunctional 2D heterostructures and micro/nanoscale photonic barcodes toward advanced anticounterfeiting and information security applications.