BrightCD: Carbon Nanodots: who is the brightest of them all?

Project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT) (Concurso para Financiamento de Projetos de Investigação Científica e Desenvolvimento Tecnológico em Todos os Domínios Ci), grant PTDC/NAN-MAT/29317/2017. Funded amount: EUR 239,879, as stated by the source. Runs 2018-09-01 to 2022-07-31. Keywords: Nanographenes, carbon quantum dots, two-photon emission, multiphoton imaging, Engineering and technology. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2026-07-23); national funding data, not CORDIS; selected because its keywords name quantum. Abstract given by the source: THE GOAL Production of carbon dots (C-dots) with high two-photon brightness tailored for imaging in biological media. Find the missing link between the structure and the nonlinear emission of C-dots enabling the controlled synthesis and engineering of such material. Translate this knowledge into a high added-value product for the global biomedical industry. WHY IS THIS GOAL IMPORTANT? Over the last two decades, the application of two-photon microscopy to preclinical biomedical research has grown exponentially.[1,2] Nonlinear (two-photon induced) emission has well-known advantages in optical bioimaging and biosensing over linear (one-photon) excitation methods, which include low background noise, low phototoxicity, deeper penetration in tissues and reduced photobleaching [3,4] Barriers to clinical translation of two-photon microscopy exist and include the complexity and cost of the instrumentation and the lengthy data acquisition and analysis. Many of these limitations are connected with the reduced two-photon emission of intrinsic fluorophores and can be mitigated by increasing the two-photon brightness of fluorophores, with implication in the reduction of the acquisition time and the cost of less demanding excitation sources.[5] C-dots, composed of a carbonaceous core of less than 10 nm,[6] have been reported with high two-photon absorption cross-sections (TPA >10E4 GM) and emission quantum yields (up to 0.78). In addition, they have unique optical properties when compared with the most advanced fluorescent labels in the market (semiconductor quantum dots and upconversion nanocrystals included),[7] namely excitation-wavelength-dependent fluorescence and versatile functionalization. Many reports exist on the observation of two-photon emission of C-dots but only few give quantitative values for the TPA cross-section. The values reported range several orders of magnitude (Table1). The general lack of reproducibility of the production of C-dots precludes insightful [shortened; the full text is on the OpenAIRE page]

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT). Retrieved 2026-10-22. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The BrightCD project, funded by FCT with a grant of EUR 239,879, ran from September 1, 2018, to July 31, 2022. It aimed to produce carbon dots with high two-photon brightness for biomedical imaging, focusing on the relationship between structure and nonlinear emission. Suggested technology pillar: enabling. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.