Optical characterization of carbon quantum dots in colloidal suspensions

The remarkable feature of carbon quantum dots is the strong broadband photoluminescence of their colloidal solutions, which is observed on a variety of simple synthetic routes. This article describes the production of carbon nanodots (C-dots) with an average size of 3 nm in poly(ethylene glycol) by laser ablation and the evaluation of the spectral molar absorption coefficient, e(λ), of these particles. In parallel we investigate optical properties as photoluminescence, lifetime and by a thermally managed Eclipse Z-scan we describe the thermo-optical properties of this colloidal suspension.