Time-resolved spectroscopy of the ensembled photoluminescence of nitrogen- and boron/nitrogen-doped carbon dots
Abstract
Carbon dots (CDs) have potential applications in various fields such as energy, catalysis, and bioimaging due to their strong and tuneable photoluminescence (PL), low toxicity, and robust chemical inertness. Although several PL mechanisms have been proposed, the origin of PL in CDs is still in debate because of the ensembled nature of the heterogeneous luminophores present in the CDs. To unravel the origin of PL in CDs, we performed time-resolved spectroscopy on two types of CDs: nitrogen-doped (N-CD) and boron–nitrogen co-doped (BN-CD). The PL decays were fitted by stretched exponential functions to estimate the distribution of the decay kinetics in the CDs, which have different PL lifetime distributions. Both CDs displayed main, blue emission decaying in 15 ns, which originates from the dominant molecular state. The analysis of the non-exponential PL decay using stretched exponential fits revealed that the functional surface luminophores are of less variety but of more environmental heterogeneity and have much lower populations in BN-CD than in N-CD.
Additional Information
© 2018 the Owner Societies. Received 13th March 2018, Accepted 11th April 2018, First published on 11th April 2018. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (2017R1A2B4010271, 2017R1A6A3A11028305, and 2017M3A7B4052802). There are no conflicts to declare.Attached Files
Supplemental Material - c8cp01619d1_si.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 86000
- DOI
- 10.1039/c8cp01619d
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20180423-083813100
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- 2017R1A2B4010271
- Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (Korea)
- 2017R1A6A3A11028305
- Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (Korea)
- 2017M3A7B4052802
- Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (Korea)
- Created
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2018-04-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field