High photoluminescent nitrogen and zinc doped carbon dots for sensing Fe3+ ions and temperature

High photoluminescent quantum yield carbon nanomaterials doped with heteroatoms are of profound attention in various fields like bio-imaging, chemical sensors and electronics. Among all heteroatoms, zinc is one of the low toxic significant elements and also involves in various electron-transfer processes. These properties are added advantages to utilize zinc as a dopant in CDs synthesis. In this investigation, our group reports a one-step microwave digestion method to synthesize nitrogen and Zinc doped carbon dots (N, Zn-CDs). The optical properties of N, Zn-CDs were investigated using UV–Vis and fluorescence spectrophotometry and also the N, Zn-CDs structural features were studied with other characterization tools like XPS, TEM , EDX, FTIR and XRD. N, Zn-CDs inherent the appreciable photoluminescent quantum yields about 63.28%. And the synthesized N, Zn-CDs utilized for detection of Fe 3+ and temperature. The observed results are promising and exhibited the detection limit of 0.027 μM. Also, the proposed sensing system was successfully adopted for the detection of Fe 3+ in the river and circulating water samples for the practical applications and satisfactory results are observed. The current synthesis methodology and sensing potential might open up a new prospect to develop potential applications in environmental monitoring.