Controllable Photoluminescent and Nonlinear Optical Properties of Polymerizable Carbon Dots and Their Arbitrary Copolymerized Gel Glasses

In this work, an efficient method is developed to prepare silane-functionalized red-emissive carbon dots and carbon dots gel glasses with arbitrary loading fraction (0-100%). The as-prepared materials possess strong photoluminescence and significant third-order nonlinear optical performances. The optical properties can be tuned by either changing solvents and pH of the solution or adjusting the loading fractions of carbon dots in gel glasses. In particular, the photoluminescence of the carbon dots and their polymerized glasses can be linearly modulated from yellow to red emission by increasing the loading fraction of carbon dots or the polarity of solvent. It is also found that the chemical copolymerization leads to superior optical properties of gel glasses to that of the carbon dots solution, because the copolymerization endows stable immobilization of carbon dots in a rigid matrix. This study provides a feasible method to prepare optoelectronic hybrid materials and devices.