Intermediate aminophenol enables hectogram-scale synthesis of highly bright red carbon quantum dots under ambient conditions.

Carbon quantum dots (C-dots) have developed into potential nanomaterials for lighting, catalysis and bioimaging because of their excellent optical properties and good biocompatibility. However, it is still a challenge to produce efficient red emitting carbon quantum dots (R-C-dots) due to their obscure formation mechanism. This work offered a method to reveal the formation process from the precursor o -phenylenediamine ( o -PDA) to R-C-dots. Different from traditional hydrothermal reactions, R-C-dots were synthesized at relatively low temperature and ambient pressure. The pre-oxidation intermediate aminophenol played an important role in the synthesis of R-C-dots, which further cross-linked and polymerized with o -PDA in an acid environment to form R-C-dots. The obtained R-C-dots had a photoluminescence quantum yield of up to 33.26% and excellent two-photon fluorescence properties. A white light-emitting diode (WLED) based on R-C-dots as the red phosphor exhibited standard white light CIE color coordinates of (0.33, 0.33) with a correlated color temperature of 5342 K and a high color rendering index (CRI) of 94.5. The obtained rendering index is the highest value among WLEDs with color coordinates of (0.33, 0.33) based on C-dots. This work provides a new perspective for the controllable large-scale synthesis of red C-dots.