Emerging perovskite photochromic materials: recent advances, mechanisms, and applications

Abstract

Ionic-doped inorganic photochromic (PC) materials have garnered increasing research interest due to their diverse PC properties. Perovskite-structured materials providing potential for exchanging multiple cations and exhibiting stronger resistance have become a focus of research. Perovskite-structured PC materials exhibit rich color variations and excellent PC properties, creating new and substantial opportunities for subsequent adjustments and optimizations of their PC performance, resulting in the construction of new PC materials and design of multifunctional applications. In this review, the latest progress in perovskite-structured PC materials is summarized and discussed. This review also covers various aspects of perovskite-structured materials, including their PC properties, the important role of different traps in PC reactions, energy transfer between their luminescence centers and color centers, systematic regulation and design of their color change and color contrast, and their potential applications in multiple fields. Perovskite PC materials show broad promise and great potential in a variety of cutting-edge applications, such as luminescence modulation, erasable digital and analog optical information storage, optical information encryption, anti-counterfeiting, optical switching, and temperature sensing. Then, some challenges and prospects in the research of perovskite-structured PC materials are summarized in this review, which will provide important guidance for the subsequent exploration of new structure designs of inorganic PC materials and the expansion of their practical applications.