Reduced-sized monolayer carbon nitride nanosheets for highly improved photoresponse for cell imaging and photocatalysis

Science China Materials - Tập 60 - Trang 109-118 - 2016
Qinghua Liang1,2,3, Zhi Li2, Yu Bai3, Zheng-Hong Huang3, Feiyu Kang1,3, Quan-Hong Yang1,4
1Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Graphene-based Materials, Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China
2Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China
3Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials (Ministry of Education), School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
4School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Tóm tắt

Two-dimensional graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) nanosheets (GCNNs) have been considered as an attractive metal-free semiconductor because of their superior catalytic, optical, and electronic properties. However, it is still challenging to prepare monolayer GCNNs with a reduced lateral size in nanoscale. Herein, a highly efficient ultrasonic technique was used to prepare nanosized monolayer graphitic carbon nitride nanosheets (NMGCNs) with a thickness of around 0.6 nm and an average lateral size of about 55 nm. With a reduced lateral size yet monolayer thickness, NMGCNs show unique photo-responsive properties as compared to both large-sized GCNNs and GCN quantum dots. A dispersion of NMGCNs in water has good stability and exhibits strong blue fluorescence with a high quantum yield of 32%, showing good biocompatibility for cell imaging. Besides, compared to the multilayer GCNNs, NMGCNs show a highly improved photocatalysis under visible light irradiation. Overall, NMGCNs, characterized with monolayer and nanosized lateral dimension, fill the gap between large size (very high aspect ratio) and quantum dot-like counterparts, and show great potential applications as sensors, photo-related and electronic devices.

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