“…Up to now, various 0D nanomaterials have been extensively explored. For instance, graphene quantum dots (GQDs) (Qian et al, 2014;Lu et al, 2018;Yan et al, 2019), carbon quantum dots (CQDs) (Zheng et al, 2015;Li et al, 2018b;Pandit et al, 2019), fullerenes (Barberis et al, 2015;, inorganic quantum dots (QDs) (Freeman et al, 2012;Li et al, 2018a;Robidillo et al, 2019), magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) (Yu et al, 2017;Bragina et al, 2019), noble metal nanoparticles (Yang C. T. et al, 2016;Jain and Chauhan, 2017;Bagheri et al, 2018), upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) (Cheng Z. H. et al, 2019;Gu et al, 2019) and polymer dots (Pdots) (Ou et al, 2019; are all representative 0D nanomaterials with potential applications in materials science (Zhang X. et al, 2014), photovoltaic science (Guo et al, 2010), catalysis (Xu et al, 2015), energy (Guldi and Sgobba, 2011), sensing (Ramanathan et al, 2019), biomedicine (Yao et al, 2018) and nanodevices (Zhang Y. et al, 2014).…”