Laser-induced fabrication of single crystal zinc hydroxyl dodecylsulfate nano-sheets with excellent fluorescence emission

Abstract

An attractive strategy to convenient synthesis of free-standing single-crystal zinc hydroxyl dodecylsulfate (ZHDS) nano-sheets has been developed by simply using laser ablation of a bulk Zn metal target in a liquid medium containing deionized water and enough/excess sodium dodecylsufate (SDS). Taking advantage of enough/an excess amount of sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS), tightly packed and highly ordered layers of DS functional groups were generated and resulted in the crystallization of metallo–organic ZHDS nano-sheets over the plasma created by laser ablation of the Zn target. The experimental results confirm that the ZHDS nano-sheets are indeed softer materials and intercalated with numerous DS functional groups in crystal structures. The novel free-standing two-dimensional ZHDS nano-sheets exhibit excellent fluorescence emission at 417 nm. It has been proved that the hydroxyl (–OH) groups should play the main role in the outstanding photoluminescence in the blue-band region. Moreover, the strong blue emission can be changed to bright green-band emission (vacancy oxygen-related PL emission in ZnO) centered at about 516 nm after annealing the ZHDS nano-sheets at 400 °C for 3 hours. The excellent performances will be of great significance for ZHDS nano-sheets in low-cost metallo/organic light-emitting material and photo-electro-chemical bio-analysis in the future. Based on pulse laser fabrication in liquid, the new conjugation of metal complexes and organic compounds has opened up exciting classes of hybrid materials for applications spanning optoelectronics, energy conversion, photodynamic therapy, etc.