LAUSR

Amorphous metal-based nanostructures have attracted great attention recently due to their facilitative electron transfer and abundant reactive sites, whereas it remains enigmatic whether the amorphous copper-based nanoparticles (CuNPs) could be achieved. Here, for synthesizing amorphous CuNPs, glutathione was adopted as ligand to inhibit the nucleation and crystallization process via its electrostatic repulsion. By subtly tailoring the solvent polarity, not only the amorphous glutathione functionalized CuNPs (GSH-CuNPs) with phosphorescent performance could be achieved after transferring the non-conjugation of GSH ligand to through-space conjugation, namely clusterization-triggered emission, but also the phosphorescence-off of GSH-CuNPs toward 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT) could be realized by the photo-induced electron transfer process through hydrogen bond channel, that was established between carboxyl and amino groups of GSH-CuNPs with the nitryl group of TNT. Benefitting from the intrinsic superiorities of the amorphous CuNPs, desired phosphorescence and detection performances of solid-state GSH-CuNPs toward airborne TNT microparticulates have been undoubtedly realized, including high quantum yield (13.22%), excellent specificity in 23 potential interferents, instantaneous response and ultralow detection limit (1.56 pg). The present GSH-CuPCs is expected to stretch amorphous metal-based nanostructures and deepen the insights of amorphous materials for optical detection. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.