▎ 摘　　要

Carbon materials have played very important roles in our society. Due to their complexity and inhomogeneity, however, our understandings of these materials have seriously lagged behind. As a result, development of new carbon materials has been largely based on trial and error. Here, we review our recent work on using well-defined colloidal graphene quantum dots as model systems to study fundamental processes in carbon materials. The future directions and limitations of this approach are also discussed. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.