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Advanced Optical Materials

Plasmon‐Thermal Driven Smart Luminescence of Rare‐Earth Doped Nanocrystals for Information Storage (Advanced Optical Materials 24/2025)

Chengyun Zhang, Qingxin Yin, Shuangkang Ge, Hui Zhang, Ruobin Zhang, Guoqiao Li, Mingdi Zhang, Qingyn Han, Wei Gao, Jun Dong, Zhenglong Zhang

Published Aug 1, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Nanophotonic Optical Memory In article 2500245, Qingfeng Yan and co-workers reveal unique optical memory effects in Y2O3:Eu3+ micro/nanocrystals with plasmonic nanostructures, transcending conventional thermal quenching. This phenomenon enables light intensity memorization through tunable absorption cross-sections, allowing information encoding in luminescent films for next-generation data storage applications.

DOI
10.1002/adom.70183

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Nanophotonic Optical Memory In article 2500245, Qingfeng Yan and co-workers reveal unique optical memory effects in Y2O3:Eu3+ micro/nanocrystals with plasmonic nanostructures, transcending conventional thermal quenching. This phenomenon enables light intensity memorization through tunable absorption cross-sections, allowing information encoding in luminescent films for next-generation data storage applications.
Abstract All‐optical responsive nanomaterials, which can rapidly switch between two stable states, have been regarded as the next‐generation memories due to their potential to realize binary information storage and implement on‐chip, integrated photonic neuromorphic systems. Rare earth oxides are preeminent candidates owing to their extraordinary luminescent stability and narrow optical transitions. However, due to the lack of simple and effective optical switches, it is difficult to realize all‐optical data storage, encoding, and retrieval by pure rare earth‐doped luminescent nanoparticles. Here, a rapid and high‐contrast of 104 luminescent switching of Y2O3:Eu3+ nanoparticle between the enhancement and quenching states is achieved by employing the strong light confinement and ultrafast thermal response of localized surface plasmon resonance. A self‐encrypted all‐optical memory is presented with optical information writing, encryption, reading, and re‐writing, and a high‐sensitivity synaptic response of emitters to frequency and light intensity flux, which can be harnessed to encrypt information flows and promote convenient and high‐security information encryption. Such a convenient and secure plasmonic thermally assisted self‐encrypting luminescent switch paves the way for constructing high‐performance stimuli‐responsive rare earth oxide crystals on demand and expanding their applications in various data encryption, anti‐counterfeiting, and rewritable colouration devices.
The possibility of increase of the information storage time in optical memory devices based on the long-lived photon echo in rare-earth ion doped crystals provided that the latter are nanometer ones is analyzed. Taking into account that in such materials the information storage time is determined by the population lifetimes of hyperfine sublevels of a ground electron state it is possible to increase it due to the modification of phonon density of states in nanocrystals as compared to bulk crystals.
Nonradiative relaxation and photoluminescence quenching in nanocrystalline powders doped with rare-earth elements are of interest in optical bistability, random laser, and other optoelectronic applications. Here, the luminescence quenching of a one-dimensional random medium made of multilayer nanoparticles (Y2O3) doped with rare-earth elements (Yb3+) is analyzed by considering the transport, transition, and interaction of the fundamental energy carriers. The nonradiative decay and luminescence quenching in random media are enhanced compared to single crystals, due to multiple scattering, enhanced absorption, and low thermal conductivity. The coherent wave treatment is used to calculate the photon absorption, allowing for field enhancement and photon localization. The luminescent and thermal emission is considered as incoherent. The size-dependent absorption coefficient and penetration depth are observed. The nonradiative decay is identified as a multiphonon relaxation process, and is found to be enhanced compared to bulk materials. The luminescence quenching and nonlinear thermal emission, occurring with increasing irradiation intensity, are predicted.
Quantum Optics The development of global quantum networks will require chip-scale optically addressable quantum memories for quantum state storage, manipulation, and state swapping. Zhong et al. fabricated a nanostructured photonic crystal cavity in a rare-earth-doped material to form a high-fidelity quantum memory (see the Perspective by Waks and Goldschmidt). The cavity enhanced the light-matter interaction, allowing quantum states to be stored and retrieved from the memory on demand. The high fidelity and small footprint of the device offer a powerful building block for a quantum information platform. Science , this issue p. [1392][1]; see also p. [1354][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aan5959 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aao2437
The explosive growth of information worldwide emerges as a great challenge for the currently-available big data center platform and compels the development of novel methods and storage devices. Far-field super-resolution techniques have shown the potential to achieve nanoscale three-dimensional optical data storage resulting in a single-disc capacity towards petabytes. In particular, super-resolution photoinduction-inhibited nanolithography (SPIN) has been used to write features with size of 9 nm, while stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy is suitable for super-resolution optical data reading. However, the combination of SPIN and STED microscopy for super-resolution optical data storage is presently limited by the high intensity required for the inhibition beam, which results in high energy consumption and damage of the data bits, and the lack of an optically-activatable material for data read-out after SPIN. Recently, rare-earth doped nanocrystals, featuring long luminescence lifetime and emission bands ranging from ultraviolet to near-infrared, have been proven adapt for low-power super-resolution optical data reading through STED microscopy and may be implemented for super-resolution data writing fully based on optical methods. Here, we report about the development of rare-earth doped nanocrystals for ultra-low power, ultra-high capacity super-resolution optical data storage. Core-shell nanoparticles were prepared via co-precipitation and measurements of emission intensity and fluorescence lifetime have been performed. Subsequently, rare-earth doped nanocrystals have been used for optical data storage under 980-nm laser excitation and the data bits were successfully retrieved back by STED microscopy. Finally, simulation results indicate the feasibility of nano-sized recordings and thus a boost of storage capacity is expected.