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Enhancing the luminescence of carbon dots by doping nitrogen element and its application in the detection of Fe(III)

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Abstract

Carbon dots (CDs) attract great interests from scientists for their low toxicity and biocompatibility properties and their important applications in the fields of photocatalysts, batteries, bio-images and supercapacitors. Most strategies of making CDs contain several steps, which can be a time-consuming and costly procedure. In this study, nitrogen-doped CDs have been prepared by a one-step hydrothermal strategy with sodium citrate and ethylenediamine as precursors. It is found that fluorescence intensity of CDs is enhanced with the increased content of doped nitrogen, which implies that nitrogen-doped element plays an important role to improve the fluorescence intensity of CDs. Most importantly, those CDs yielded high selectivity of Fe3+, with good linearity, precision and accuracy. Hence, the as-prepared nitrogen-doped CDs could be used as probes for quantitative analysis of Fe3+ in environmental applications.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Science Foundation of China University of Petroleum Beijing (No. 2462014YJRC011) for the support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of New Energy, State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), Beijing, 102248, China

    Quan Xu, Jungang Zhao, Yao Liu, Peng Pu, Xuesong Wang & Hongjun Zhou

  2. Department of Chemistry, University of Akron, Akron, 44325, USA

    Yusheng Chen & Chun Gao

  3. Department of Chemical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, Shaanxi, China

    Jiarui Chen

Authors
  1. Quan Xu
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  2. Jungang Zhao
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  3. Yao Liu
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  4. Peng Pu
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  7. Chun Gao
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  9. Hongjun Zhou
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Correspondence to Quan Xu.

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Xu, Q., Zhao, J., Liu, Y. et al. Enhancing the luminescence of carbon dots by doping nitrogen element and its application in the detection of Fe(III). J Mater Sci 50, 2571–2576 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-015-8822-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-015-8822-6

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