Room-temperature synthesized carbon quantum dots and potential applications to cell imaging

Abstract

Carbon quantum dots (CQDs) with excellent properties have attracted attention owing to wide applications in many fields. In this paper, we report a method to synthesize CQDs at room temperature without any external energy supply and energy-catalyzing reagents. The characterization results indicate that the CQDs have good dispersion and water solubility, the averaged dimension is around 5.37 nm, consisting mainly of C, O, N, and S elements, the fluorescence quantum yield was 8.72%. In addition, the experimental results show that CQDs have excellent optical stability and good biocompatibility, which can be used in the field of cellular imaging