One‐Pot Hydrothermal Synthesis of Highly Fluorescent Polyethyleneimine‐capped Copper Nanoclusters for Specific Detection of Rifampicin

Herein, a novel bright‐green and highly fluorescent polyethyleneimine capped copper nanoclusters (CuNCs@PEI) has been hydrothermally synthesized, which is employed as a fluorescence probe to determine rifampicin. Under optimum synthetic conditions, the morphology, surface chemistry and optical features of resulting CuNCs@PEI are well characterized by transmission electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, UV–Vis absorption spectra, transient and steady‐state fluorescence. In comparison to previous reports, the new species with a larger diameter of approximately 3 nm exhibit higher fluorescence quantum yield (QY) up to nearly 10.7%, and demonstrate tolerability to extreme pH, high ionic strengths as well as long‐term UV irradiation. These excellent optical properties ascribe to unique grain size and surface chemical features of products, which are further discussed in this work. In addition, we employed as‐prepared CuNCs@PEI to detect rifampicin based on fluorescence quenching phenomenon. The fluorescence intensity of probe is linearly proportional to rifampicin over the concentration rage from 0 to 20 μM, where the limit of detection (LOD) is 50 nM. Besides, this probe can be also used to assay rifampicin in serum samples with satisfactory recoveries.