With the assistance of microwave irradiation, greenish‐yellow luminescent graphene quantum dots (gGQDs) with a quantum yield (QY) up to 11.7% are successfully prepared via cleaving graphene oxide (GO) under acid conditions. The cleaving and reduction processes are accomplished simultaneously using microwave treatment without additional reducing agent. When the gGQDs are further reduced with NaBH4, bright blue luminescent graphene quantum dots (bGQDs) are obtained with a QY as high as 22.9%. Both GQDs show well‐known excitation‐dependent PL behavior, which could be ascribed to the transition from the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) to the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) with a carbene‐like triplet ground state. Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) is observed from the graphene quantum dots for the first time, suggesting promising applications in ECL biosensing and imaging. The ECL mechanism is investigated in detail. Furthermore, a novel sensor for Cd2+ is proposed based on Cd2+ induced ECL quenching with cysteine (Cys) as the masking agent.

Photonic crystal materials are developed from colloidal crystal fibers or beads. As the fibers have cylindrical symmetry, the fiber-composed PhCs show anisotropic angle independence. By contrast, the bead-composed PhCs display angle-independent structural colors because of the spherical symmetry of their bead elements.

The marriage of energy transfer with electrochemiluminescence has produced a new technology named electrochemiluminescence energy transfer (ECL-ET), which can realize effective and sensitive detection of biomolecules. To obtain optimal ECL-ET efficiency, perfect energy overlapped donor/acceptor pair is of great importance. Herein, we present a sensitive ECL-ET based immunosensor for the detection of tumor markers, using energy tunable CdSeTe/CdS/ZnS double shell quantum dots (QDs) and gold nanorods (GNRs) as the donor and acceptor, respectively. Firstly a facile microwave-assisted strategy for the synthesis of green- to near-infrared-emitting CdSeTe/CdS/ZnS QDs with time- and component-tunable photoluminescence was proposed. And, on the basis of the adjustable optical properties of both CdSeTe/CdS/ZnS QDs and GNRs, excellent overlap between donor emission and acceptor absorption can be obtained to ensure effective ECL-ET quenching, thus improving the sensing sensitivity. This method represents a novel approach for versatile detection of biomolecules at low concentrations.

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An angle-independent photonic crystal (PhC) colorimetric sensor was developed by using a stimuli-response hydrogel to replicate the template arrays of isotropic photonic crystal beads (PCBs) for the detection of Hg(2+).