Tunable dual fluorescence emissions with high photoluminescence quantum yields modulated by Na ion dispersion method for purely solid state N-doped carbon dots

Abstract

In this work, we reported a facile Na ion dispersion (NID) method for simply preparing a series of purely solid state N-doped carbon dots (NCDots) with tunable photoluminescence from blue to yellow light. We demonstrated for the first time that tunable multicolor photoluminescence is ascribed as dual fluorescence emissions modulated by the ratio between surface state (SS) and core state (CS) of NCDots, respectively. Moreover, we revealed that the emission of CS is determined by heterocycle N and the emission of SS is related to amino N and Na ion. Furthermore, the common aggregation caused quenching (ACQ) phenomenon of solid state CDots is efficiently inhibited by introducing NID effect. Therefore, photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of our purely solid state NCDots could be up to 80.7 %, to the best of our knowledge, which is the highest PLQY for the purely solid state CDots until now. This work paves the way for the development of purely solid state CDots with high PLQY and tunable multicolor photoluminescence and applications in optoelectronic device and cell imaging fields.