A fast dark-field scattering technique capturing full broadband spectra with millisecond time-resolution enables us to monitor the growth or assembly of single nano-objects in situ and in real time. Applying this technique to study the growth of single gold nanorods, together with scanning electron microscopy and finite-difference time-domain simulations, reveals precise quantitative informatio...

The design of liposome-nanoparticle hybrids offers a rich toolbox for the fabrication of multifunctional modalities. A self-assembled liposome-gold nanorod hybrid vesicular system that consists of lipid-bilayer-associated gold nanorods designed to allow deep tissue detection, therapy, and monitoring in living animals using multispectral optoacoustic tomography has been fabricated and characteri...

Gold nanorod supercrystals have been widely employed for the detection of relevant bioanalytes with detection limits ranging from nano- to picomolar levels, confirming the promising nature of these structures for biosensing. Even though a relationship between the height of the supercrystal (i.e., the number of stacked nanorod layers) and the enhancement factor has been proposed, no systematic s...

Metal nanoparticles are used as catalysts in a variety of important chemical reactions, and can have a range of different shapes, with facets and sites that differ in catalytic reactivity. To develop better catalysts it is necessary to determine where catalysis occurs on such nanoparticles and what structures are more reactive. Surface science experiments or theory can be used to predict the re...

Metal-enhanced fluorescence has attracted much attention due to its scientific importance and lots of potential applications. Plasmon coupled metal nanoparticles have been demonstrated to further improve the enhancement effects. Conventional studies of metal-enhanced fluorescence on the bulk systems are complicated by the ensemble average effects over many critical factors with large variations...

A novel, solution-based method is presented to prepare bifunctional gold nanorods (B-NRs), assemble B-NRs end-to-end in various solvents, and disperse linked B-NRs in a polymer matrix. The B-NRs have poly(ethylene glycol) grafted along its long axis and cysteine adsorbed to its ends. By controlling cysteine coverage, bifunctional ligands or polymer can be end-grafted to the AuNRs. Here, two dit...

Nanothermometers composed from a gold nanorod core, temperature sensitive linker and fluorescent dye are reported. The nanothermometers have low fluorescence due to a self-quenching mechanism at temperatures below 50 °C and become highly fluorescence above 70 °C.

Coupled plasmonic assemblies have recently attracted tremendous research interest in the field of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) due to their unique optical and biocompatible properties. Using DNA to connect different parts of assembled plasmonic nanostructures has been a simple but useful method to achieve the expected nanocomposites. This work prepared a satellite SERS substrate bas...

During recent decades metallic nanoparticles have been found very interesting due to their unique characteristics which make them suitable for different applications. In this research, for the very first time, we tried to perform selective surface photo activation chemistry on the targeted facets of nanoparticles while they are in suspension. This technique enabled us to form desired assemblies...

We developed the photo-crosslinkable hydrogel microfluidic co-culture device to study photothermal therapy and cancer cell migration. To culture MCF7 human breast carcinoma cells and metastatic U87MG human glioblastoma in the microfluidic device, we used 10 w/v% gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) hydrogels as a semi-permeable physical barrier. We demonstrated the effect of gold nanorod on phototherma...