Nitrogen-Bearing Carbon Nanoparticles by Pyrolytic Decomposition of Piperazine Citrate Macromolecules for Cellular Imaging

In this work, highly photoluminescent carbon nanoparticles (CNPs) are fabricated by pyrolytic decomposition of piperazine citrate at high pressure and high temperature. Piperazine serves as a hydrolytic, surface-passivating, and N-doping agent, facilitating the formation of a photopolymer. The as-synthesized CNPs, without any surface protection/passivation, exhibit excellent photolumi-nescence and a maximum quantum yield of 84%. The average particle size of the N-doped CNPs is 0.89±0.05 nm. In addition, the N-doped CNPs exhibit uniform diameters and nearly spherical shapes. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results reveal that the CNPs are composed of carbon (64.4 wt%), oxygen (18.5 wt%), and nitrogen (17.1 wt%), indicating the presence of nitrogen-doped and carbon-rich moieties in the CNPs. Notably, the CNPs purified by the procedure developed in this work exhibit more stable luminescence properties than those purified with the conventional dialysis membrane. In addition, the potential application of the CNPs as fluorescent bioimaging probes, which offer a broad dosing window and exhibit multicolor emission, is investigated by directly cultur-ing A549 cells with the CNPs. The results reveal that the CNPs exhibit not only exceptional optical stability, but also outstanding biocompatibility and cell labeling capability. After incubating the A549 cells with CNPs, the CNPs are confined in perinuclear vacuole-similar shapes with a granulated form in cytoplasm preserving the nucleus. Notably, no significant morphological deterioration such as nuclear contraction is detected.

Polarization behavior of the exciton-polariton emission of ZnO-based microresonators

We present the polarization behavior of the exciton-polariton luminescence of a ZnO-based all-oxide resonator. A splitting in the emission energy between the s- and p-polarized pho-toluminescence of the lower polariton branch was observed which increases with increasing emission angle. It is caused by the polarization behavior of the uncoupled cavity-photon mode, and reaches a maximum of about 5 meV at an emission angle near the bottleneck region. For lar-ger angles the energy splitting decreases. Additionally to the energy splitting, we observed dif-ferences in the photoluminescence intensity which we trace back to different occupation of the lower polariton branch for the two polarizations. Whereas for p-polarization a bottleneck effect is clearly observable, this effect is much weaker for s-polarization. These findings indicate that the relaxation of hot carriers into the bottleneck region is enhanced for the p-polarized photolumi-nescence compared to the s-polarized one. The differences between these two polarizations are most pronounced for a very large negative detuning and vanish with increasing detuning.