The invention discloses a method for synthesizing carbon dots and detecting 
copper ions in a 
water body, and relates to the technical field of 
carbon dot synthesis, and the method is technically characterized by comprising the following steps: synthesizing fluorescent carbon dots by taking tea as a 
raw material and adopting a hydrothermal method, and optimizing synthesis conditions; with the synthesized fluorescent carbon dots as probes and by means of the 
fluorescence of the carbon dots, detecting 
copper ions in the 
water body, opetimizing the conditions for detecting the 
copper ions, and detecting the Cu<2+> in the 
water body by virtue of a 
linear relationship between the 
fluorescence intensity of the fluorescent carbon dots and the Cu<2+> concentration. According to the preparation method, the tea is taken as a 
raw material, the fluorescent carbon dots are synthesized by adopting a hydrothermal method, and synthesis conditions are optimized, so that the preparation operation of the carbon dots is simple, the preparation efficiency is high, and meanwhile, the synthesized carbon dots are good in 
fluorescence property, 
photobleaching resistance and 
salt resistance; and besides, the synthesized fluorescent carbon dots are used for detecting Cu<2+> in a water body, Cu<2+> in the water body is detected by utilizing a fluorescence spectrophotometric method, the detection sensitivity is high, the selectivity is good, and simple and 
rapid detection of heavy 
metal ions in an 
environmental water sample can be realized.