Orange-fluorescence carbon dots employed for the quantitative analysis of silver ions and glyphosine through the off–on mode

Abstract

Here we successfully developed a kind of carbon dot (CD), which emitted obvious orange-fluorescence, based on the hydrothermal method while polyacrylic acid was employed as the carbon source. The developed CDs have been equipped with multiple functional groups such as CO, –OH and –COOH, facilitating the possibility of interacting with potential targets. Meaningfully, the introduction of silver ions induced the fluorescence quenching of the as-prepared CDs. Meanwhile, the proposed CDs achieved detection of Ag⁺ with a linear range of 2.0 × 10⁻⁶ to 1.0 × 10⁻³ M at a detection limit of 1.8 × 10⁻⁶ M. Moreover, the further addition of glyphosine gradually recovered the fluorescence accompanied by the concentration of glyphosine varying from 7 × 10⁻⁶ to 10⁻² M with a detection limit of 6.2 × 10⁻⁶ M. Thereby, the CDs prepared here show potential for broadening the avenues for detecting Ag⁺ and glyphosine.