Photoluminescence properties research on graphene quantum dots/silver composites

Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) possess unique properties of graphene and exhibit a series of new phenomena of 0 dimension (D) carbon materials. Thus, GQDs have attracted much attention from researchers and have shown great promise for many applications. Recently, many works focus on GQDs-metal ions and metal nanoparticles (NPs). Although, many researches point out that metal ions and metal NPs have significant effect on photoluminescence (PL) feature of GQDs, mainly focus on PL intensity. Here, for the first time, we reported that metal NPs also affected PL peak position which was dependent on the mix mechanism of metal and GQDs. When GQDs-silver (Ag) composite mixed by physical method and excited at a wavelength of 320 nm, PL peak position of composites first showed blue-shifted then red-shifted with increasing of Ag content. However, if GQDs-Ag composite prepared by chemical method, PL peak position of the composites blue-shifted. Furthermore, the shift of PL peak position of GQDs-Ag prepared both for physical and chemical method displayed excitation-dependent feature. When the excitation wavelength approached to Ag SPR peaks, no obvious PL shift was observed. The mechanism for different PL shifts and the phenomenon of excitation-dependent PL shift as well as the formation mechanism of GQDs-Ag composite by chemical method are discussed in detail in this paper.