Environmentally friendly photodegradation of refractory pollutants utilizing semiconductor photocatalysis evolution exhibits satisfactory efficiency and low energy consumption, but some of its unbefitting band position largely limits practical applications. The controllable band structure tuning via coupling low-dimensional materials with enormous potential in semiconductor photocatalysis, notably attractive carbon quantum dots (CQDs) induced for a better utilization of low-energy photoexcitation of promising inherent optical properties and photocatalytic performance on organic pollutant degradation. Here, a CQDs modified ZnO hybrid materials was synthesized and the CQDs preluded carbon-incorporated burger-like ZnO nanoparticles clusters were presented thus demonstrated a specific doping-effect. The dispersity improved by loading halloysite nanotube (HNTs) for efficiently photocatalytic activity enhancement. Furthermore, the band structure, excitation and photocatalytic reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation were detected to reveal the photochemical properties and plausible mechanism of CQDs hybrid nanomaterials system. It is observed that the superoxide radical (O-2(center dot-)), and singlet oxygen (O-1(2)) are the principal ROS agents under UV-vis excitations. This work not only displays a CQDs modified system of expanding photo-response range to visible light but also throws a way for quantum elemental incorporated on the influence of band-tuning for semiconductor- dominated photocatalysts. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.