Stimuli‐Responsive Lanthanide‐Based Smart Luminescent Materials for Optical Encoding and Bio‐applications

Abstract Lanthanide based luminescent materials have attracted extensive attention in a wide range of fields including chemistry, biology and logic due to the narrow emission band, long decay time of the excited state, low auto‐fluorescence background and excellent photostability. More interestingly, stimuli‐responsive lanthanide‐based luminescent materials have exhibited enormous application prospects in optical encoding and bio‐applications. In this review, we summarize these aspects of the development of stimuli‐responsive smart lanthanide luminescent materials by sorting the stimuli into several categories, including photo‐, pH‐, thermo‐ and molecule‐responsive. These unique stimuli‐responsive properties endow these materials with great potential in enriching code library and expanding data storage. Additionally, these properties have also been studied widely for bio‐applications, including drug release, imaging biosensing, cell adhesion, and cancer therapy. Based on these two aspects, we highlight the recent progress of lanthanide‐based smart luminescent materials.