The first use of an organosilane as a coordinating solvent to synthesize highly luminescent (quantum yield = 47%) amorphous carbon dots (CDs) in one minute is reported. The CDs, which benefit from surface methoxysilyl groups, have a diameter of ~0.9 nm and can easily be fabricated into pure CD fluorescent films or monoliths simply by heating them at 80 ºC for 24 h. Moreover, the non‐water‐stable CDs can be further transformed into water‐soluble CDs/silica particles, which are biocompatible with and nontoxic to the selected cell lines in our preliminary evaluation. The proposed novel synthetic route is believed to provide an alternative synthesis route and should inspire more research into the origin and applications of CDs, as well as delivering CD‐based materials.
Silane pre-functionalized carbon dots, arbitrarily doped (0-100% scale) carbon dot nanohybrid gel glasses and macrostructures with high luminescence (quantum yields = 47% and 88%, respectively) and broadband optical limiting properties (532 and 1064 nm) are reported. These glasses are optically, thermally, and mechanically stable, as well as highly transmissive (ca. 90%) in the 400-1350 nm region.
Carbon dots (CDs) have potentials to be utilized in optoelectronic devices, bioimaging, and photocatalysis. The majority of the current CDs with high quantum yield to date were limited in the blue light emission region. Herein, on the basis of surface electron-state engineering, we report a kind of CDs with reversible switching ability between green and red photoluminescence with a quantum yield (QY) of both up to 80%. Highly efficient green and red solid-state luminescence is realized by doping CDs into a highly transparent matrix of methyltriethoxysilane and 3-triethoxysilylpropylamine to form CDs/gel glasses composites with QYs of 80 and 78%. The CDs/gel glasses show better transmittance in visible light bands and excellent thermal stability. A blue-pumped CDs/gel glasses phosphor-based trichromatic white light-emitting diode (WLED) is realized, whose color rendering index is 92.9. The WLED gets the highest luminous efficiency of 71.75 lm W in CDs-based trichromatic WLEDs. This work opens a door for developing highly efficient green- and red-emissive switching CDs which were used as phosphors for WLEDs and have the tendency for applications in other fields, such as sensing, bioimaging, and photocatalysis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.