Synthesis And Application Of Fluorescent Carbon Dots

Fluorescent carbon dot is a new type of carbon nanomaterial that mainly composed of carbon. It has a promising application prospect in biomedical field because of its unique optical properties and good biocompatibility. Although on the preparation of carbon dots had a great breakthrough, it still a hot topic how to synthesize carbon dots by using simplest ways and most economical materials. Meanwhile, how to take advantage of existing resources to optimize the utilization has caused the attentions of people all over the world. Straw of crops is a kind of typical biological waste, mostly disposed by incineration, it’s been wasteful and polluted. Therefore, making good use of it to develop its biggest function is worth trying. Here we report a green, economical, one-pot method for synthesizing blue photoluminescent C-dots by hydrothermal treatment of wheat straw. By using XPS and XRD, we show the as-prepared C-dots are amorphous in structure and mainly composed of C element. Their tiny size (<2 nm) combined with the characteristic excitation dependent relatively bright emission. Through lots of experiments show that this carbon dot has good optical stability and can be made into the fluorescent ink, also can be used in the detection of Fe3+, imaging(e. coli and c. elegans, etc). So this kind of carbon dot can be a very promising material in biomedical field.