Abstract
Multicolor emissions from carbon dots (CDs) are vital for light-emitting diodes (LEDs), particularly for direct, white-light emission (WLE), which enables a replacement of rare earth (RE)-doped phosphors. However, the difficulty of synthesizing single-component WLE CDs with full-spectrum emission severely hinders further investigation of their emission mechanisms and practical applications. Here, we demonstrate rational design and synthesis of chromatically tunable CDs with cyan-, orange-, and white-light emission, precisely tunable along the blackbody Planckian locus by controlling the ratio of different nitrogen dopant sites. We adopted 15N solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to identify and quantify N-dopants in different sites and environments, and we explain their influence on emission properties of these CDs. This study provides guiding …
