Nanoconfinement Enabled High-Efficiency and Long-Lifetime Multicolor Afterglow Hydrogels for Advanced Spatiotemporal Encryption and Pathogen Eradication.

Multicolor organic afterglow hydrogels that simultaneously possess efficient exciton harvesting, ultralong lifetimes and large deformations are still rare. Here, a nano-restriction engineered strategy that embeds a rigid and chromatically diverse hydrogen bond supramolecular framework into hydrogel networks is presented. The confined microenvironment of the supramolecular framework suppresses non-radiative quenching to prolong triplet lifetimes and acts as stress-dissipating nodes to reinforce the polymer matrix. The synthesized hydrogels exhibit tunable afterglow emissions from deep blue to orange-red, lifetimes up to 2535 ms, and quantum yields above 29.4%, while retaining a compressive strength of 7.7 MPa and fracture strain near 1400%, with excellent stability under repeated cycling. Programmable color and decay dynamics of afterglow hydrogels enable spatiotemporally resolved encryption. Moreover, the long-lived triplet excitons efficiently sensitize singlet oxygen, delivering >99.9% antibacterial efficacy to accelerate infected wound healing. This approach provides a general route to develop multifunctional afterglow soft materials that couple high exciton utilization and ultralong lifetime with mechanical robustness.