As emergent nanolights for bioimaging, catalysis, sensors, and photoelectronics, carbon dots (C-dots) have attracted much research attention. However, the practical and scalable preparation of C-dots has been less explored, even after various top-down and bottom-up approaches being reported recently. To this end, we discover a new approach to prepare C-dots by simply unzipping core-shell polymeric nanoparticles, prepared by a microemulsion polymerization. Uniformly distributed N-doped C-dots are prepared by the pyrolysis of PAN@PMMA core-shell nanoparticles at different temperatures, followed by dialysis. TEM analysis shows that many of the C-dots of 2-3 nm size are unzipped from each polymeric particle. All the purified C-dots show a bandgap-like photoluminescence (PL) behaviour, with dual emission and a stable PL between pH 5-12.

N719 co-sensitized with a conjugated polyphenylene (7-BC) shows a high efficiency of 9.68% (VOC of 750 mV, JSC of 18.18 mA cm−2 and FF of 0.71) in dye-sensitized solar cells, exhibiting an improvement of 16% compared to devices sensitized with N719 (PCE of 8.34%) alone.

A bottom-up synthesis of three-dimensional (3D) carbon nanomembranes (CNMs) was developed through Friedel-Crafts cross-linking of phenyl self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on silica nanospheres (SNSs) followed by high temperature treatment and template removal. The CNMs show a hierarchically 3D connected porous structure and the pore sizes are facilely tuned by varying the sizes of SNS templates. CNMs with high surface area (>1500 m 2 g À1 ), large pore volume ($3 cm 3 g À1 ) and partially graphitized frameworks exhibited good performances as supercapacitor electrode materials. The specific capacitance of the porous 3D CNMs reached 202 F g À1 at a current density of 0.5 A g À1 in an aqueous electrolyte.

Three enediyne-bridged D–π–A dyes with different donor position and number are synthesized and their performance on DSSCs are investigated.

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