Cooccurrence of pH-sensitive shifting blue and immobile green triple surface-state fluorescence in ultrasmall super body-centered cubic carbon quantum dots

Abstract Carbon quantum dots are widely used in various fields owing to excellent optical properties and outstanding biocompatibility. We synthesize rare super body-centered cubic (C ₈ ) structured carbon quantum dots by using cheap source materials and simple preparation method. They exhibit one shifting blue emission band and two close immobile green bands. They have large Stokes shifts ranging from 0.68 to 1.01 eV and large quantum yields as high as 60%. The three types of emissions are competitive and their intensities vary sensitively and differently with pH. Moreover, their emission intensity versus excitation power curves follow I(P)∝{P}^k with k values significantly smaller than unity. The blue emission follows the stretched exponential decay law with an intermediate lifetime of ∼3.9 ns and a lifetime-dispersion factor of ∼0.85 whereas the two green emissions exhibit faster and slower decays with respective lifetimes of around 2.0 and 13.0 ns. The results reveal that the blue emission originates from an ensemble of emission sites exhibiting quantum confinement-like effect and two green emissions stem from pH-sensitive surface functional groups-associated fluorophores.