Ultrafast turbulence-induced disintegration of BN and WS2 quantum dots for potential multifunctional nanotheranostics

To facilitate progression from the laboratory to commercial applications, it will be necessary to develop facile and scalable methods to produce high-quality quantum dots (QDs) of layered two-dimensional materials (LTMs). In this paper, we for the first time report a turbulence-induced disintegration method to prepare ultra-small BN and WS2 QDs, which can easily be achieved only using a household kitchen blender to directly disintegrate their bulk counterparts in liquids. The resulting ultra-small BN and WS2 QDs exhibit excellent photoluminescence and photo-thermal converting properties, respectively. As proof-of-concept applications, these properties have great promise in cell-imaging probes and photo-thermal therapy. This work not only provides successful paradigms for preparing the QDs of other LTMs but also demonstrates potential applications for the QDs. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.