Facile one-pot synthesis of long-term thermally stable CDs@AlOOH toward white-light illumination

Recently, carbon dots (CDs) have received much attention in light-emitting applications owing to their low cost, non-toxicity and favorable fluorescence. In view of the aggregation-induced quenching effect and poor thermal stability of CDs, the development of a simple and high-efficiency strategy for solving these tough issues and improving the practicality of CDs is urgently necessary. Herein, a CD doped boehmite composite (CDs@AlOOH) is directly achieved through a facile one-step decomposition route. The uniform dispersion of CDs in AlOOH effectively alleviates the adverse self-quenching effect of CDs and gives rise to a tunable fluorescence feature of the composite. The N doping and energy transfer between CDs and AlOOH are beneficial for the photoluminescence (PL) enhancement of CDs@AlOOH. Meanwhile, CDs@AlOOH has outstanding long-term thermal stability, and maintains 98%, 90% and 80% of the initial PL performance after air heating treatment at 150 °C for 100 h, 250 h and 500 h, respectively. Moreover, the white lighting application is also demonstrated by combining CDs@AlOOH samples and commercial UV/blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) without other phosphors. What is discussed in this study might offer some inspiration for dealing with the bottleneck problems of CDs in practical lighting and display fields.