Issue 42, 2022

Ultrafast insights into full-colour light-emitting C-Dots

Abstract

Designing carbon dots (C-Dots) in a controlled way requires a profound understanding of their photophysical properties, such as the origin of their fluorescence and excitation wavelength-dependent emission properties, which has been a perennial problem in the last few decades. Herein, we synthesized three different C-Dots (blue, green, and red-emitting C-Dots) from the same starting materials via a hydrothermal method and separated them by silica column chromatography. All the purified C-Dots exhibited three different emission maxima after a certain range of different excitations, showing a high optical uniformity in their emission properties. It was also observed that the average distributions of the particle size in all the C-Dots were the same with a typical size of 4 nm and the same interplanar d spacing of ∼0.21 nm. Here, we tried to establish a well-defined conclusive answer to the puzzling optical properties of C-Dots via successfully investigating the carrier dynamics of their core and surface state with a myriad use of steady-state, time-resolved photoluminescence, and ultrafast transient absorbance spectroscopy techniques. The ultrafast charge-carrier dynamics of the core and surface state clearly indicated that the graphitic nitrogen in the core state and the oxygen-containing functional group in the surface state predominately contribute to controlling their wide range of emission properties. We believe that these findings will give the C-Dots their own designation in the fluorophore world and create a new avenue for designing and developing C-Dot-based new architectures.

Graphical abstract: Ultrafast insights into full-colour light-emitting C-Dots

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
24 avq 2022
Accepted
05 okt 2022
First published
06 okt 2022

Nanoscale, 2022,14, 15812-15820

Ultrafast insights into full-colour light-emitting C-Dots

N. Ghorai, S. Bhunia, S. Burai, H. N. Ghosh, P. Purkayastha and S. Mondal, Nanoscale, 2022, 14, 15812 DOI: 10.1039/D2NR04642C

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements