Stability of carbon quantum dots: a critical review

Carbon quantum dots (CQDs) are fluorescent carbon nanomaterials with unique optical and structural properties that have drawn extensive attention from researchers in the past few decades. Environmental friendliness, biocompatibility and cost effectiveness of CQDs have made them very renowned in countless applications including solar cells, white light-emitting diodes, bio-imaging, chemical sensing, drug delivery, environmental monitoring, electrocatalysis, photocatalysis and other related areas. This review is explicitly dedicated to the stability of CQDs under different ambient conditions. Stability of CQDs is very important for every possible application and no review has been put forth to date that emphasises it, to the best of our knowledge. This review's primary goal is to make the readers cognizant of the importance of stability, ways to assess it, factors that affect it and proposed ways to enhance the stability for making CQDs suitable for commercial applications.