Facile synthesis of yellow emissive carbon dots with high quantum yield and their application in construction of fluorescence-labeled shape memory nanocomposite

Synthesizing carbon dots (CDs) with efficient long-wavelength emissions (i.e., yellow-to red light) generally suffer from sophisticated approaches, time-consuming process, harsh conditions, and requirement of organic solvent ; also, a further limitation of the resulting CDs is relatively low quantum yield (QY) in aqueous solution. Herein, novel yellow emitting CDs (Y-CDs) with a considerable QY of 62.8% were synthesized from a precursor comprising resorcinol and o-phenylenediamine via a facile microwave method. To probe the fluorescence mechanism, another typical resorcinol-derived CDs using ethylenediamine as dopant were fabricated as well, showing strong green emission with an absolute QY of 60.6%. Spectroscopic and structural characterizations indicated that the distinct redshift of green to yellow emission depended on the dimension of conjugated sp 2 -domain and the content of graphitic N heavily, while the excellent QY was highly related to the low proportion of defective sp 2 carbon cluster and high nitrogen content within CDs. Moreover, the Y-CDs were confirmed to be capable of introducing additional crosslinking points in poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) polymer, which resulted in the Y-CDs-contained nanocomposite behaving superior and tunable water-induced shape recovery performances. Importantly, since being labeled with long-wavelength emission, the responsiveness of PVA/Y-CDs composite will contribute to its versatile utilization in biology-relevant fields.