Multicolor carbon dots with concentration-tunable fluorescence and solvent-affected aggregation states for white light-emitting diodes

Fanyong Yan; Yingxia Jiang; Xiaodong Sun; Junfu Wei; Liang Chen; Yuyang Zhang

doi:10.1007/s12274-019-2569-3

Nano Research 2020, 13(1): 52-60 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2569-3

Research Article | Issue | Published: 04 December 2019

Multicolor carbon dots with concentration-tunable fluorescence and solvent-affected aggregation states for white light-emitting diodes

Show Author's Information Hide Author's Information Fanyong Yan^¹(

), Yingxia Jiang^¹, Xiaodong Sun^¹, Junfu Wei^¹(

), Liang Chen^², Yuyang Zhang^¹

1State Key Laboratory of Separation Membranes and Membrane Processes, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Tiangong University, Tianjin 300387, China

2Graduate School of Life Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 0010024, Japan

Keywords:

formation mechanism, carbon dots, concentration-tunable fluorescence, solvent-affected aggregation states, light-emitting devices

Topics:

Carbon Fluorescence Organic solvents

Cite this article:

Yan F, Jiang Y, Sun X, et al. Multicolor carbon dots with concentration-tunable fluorescence and solvent-affected aggregation states for white light-emitting diodes. Nano Research, 2020, 13(1): 52-60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2569-3

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Abstract Full text Electronic supplementary material About this article

Abstract

Multicolor emissive carbon dots (M-CDs) have tremendous potential applications in manifold fields of bioimaging, biomedicine and light-emitting devices. Until now, it is still difficult to produce fluorescence tunable CDs with high quantum yield across the entire visible spectra. In this work, a type of M-CDs with concentration-tunable fluorescence and solvent-affected aggregation states was synthesized by solvothermal treatment of citric acid (CA) and 1-(2-pyridylazo)-2-naphthol (PAN) and the formation mechanism was monitored by different reaction time and raw material ratio. The fluorescence spectra of M-CDs in organic solvents can range from 350 to 750 nm by adjusting the concentration. M-CDs possess different aggregation states in water and organic solvents, accompanied by different fluorescence emission, which is attributed to the different surface states of various component CDs in M-CDs. Moreover, the obtained products can be uniformly dispersed into polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) solutions as well as epoxy resins to fabricate transparent CDs/PMMA films and CDs/epoxy composites, which can effectively prevent the aggregation and produce multicolor and white light-emitting diodes (WLED). In addition, the prepared WLED with Commission Internationale de L'Eclairage (CIE) of (0.29, 0.31) by using M-CDs/epoxy resin as packages, demonstrating the M-CDs exhibit potential applications for light-emitting devices.

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About this article

Multicolor carbon dots with concentration-tunable fluorescence and solvent-affected aggregation states for white light-emitting diodes

Show Author's information Hide Author's Information Fanyong Yan^¹(

), Yingxia Jiang^¹, Xiaodong Sun^¹, Junfu Wei^¹(

), Liang Chen^², Yuyang Zhang^¹

1State Key Laboratory of Separation Membranes and Membrane Processes, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Tiangong University, Tianjin 300387, China

2Graduate School of Life Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 0010024, Japan

Abstract

Keywords: formation mechanism, carbon dots, concentration-tunable fluorescence, solvent-affected aggregation states, light-emitting devices

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Acknowledgements

Publication history

Received: 15 September 2019

Revised: 10 November 2019

Accepted: 12 November 2019

Published: 04 December 2019

Issue date: January 2020

Copyright

Acknowledgements

The work described in this manuscript was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51678409, 51638011 and 51578375), Tianjin Research Program of Application Foundation and Advanced Technology (Nos. 18JCYBJC87500 and 15ZCZDSF00880), State Key Laboratory of Separation Membranes and Membrane Processes (No. Z1-201507), and the Program for Innovative Research Team in University of Tianjin (No. TD13-5042).