Plasmon coupling occurs when two or more excited plasmonic nanoparticles approach each other to a distance below approximately one diameter's length. Once the coupling happens, the electromagnetic field in the interparticle gap to be boosted by several orders of magnitude, which enables many exciting applications in areas such as bioimaging and phototherapy. The current challenges for designing plasmonic coupling nanostructures remain in terms of the relatively complicated synthesis and fabrications. In this presentation, we porpose a highly effcient confined seeded growth strategy for the preparation of metallic nanostructures with complex plasmon coupling, using Au as a representitative demonstration. Specifically, the growth of Au is confined to a narrow tubular space of preformed rod-shaped polymer nanocapsules, which uniquely enables the automatic clustering of Au nanoparticles during the growth processes, thereby avoiding the complex self-assembly involved in the conventional synthesis. The flexibility of this method has been demonstrated by producing Au nanoparticles clusters (AuNCs) with varying plasmon coupling frequencies from visible to near infrare by precisely controlling the interparticle distance through adjusting the amount of precursors. The strong coupling of AuNCs to the incident light successively transefer the incident energy to generate heat with ultrahigh photothermal conversion efficiency (~78%), and can effetively excite triplet oxygen to siglet oxygen by Förster resonance energy transfer, which results in enhanced performance in photo-induced cancer therapy.

Space-confined seeded growth of Au nanostructures for highly efficient photo-induced cancer therapy

2019 Fall National Meeting

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