Studying the optical properties of lanthanide-doped multi-shell nanoparticles

In collaboration with Prof. Fernando Sigoli (from the Institute of Chemistry) and other researchers, we contributed to the study of the emission properties of core-shell nanoparticles. We investigated nanoparticles with a cubic core containing DyIII ions and hexagonal shells where ErIII, YbIII and NdIII ions were distributed. We observed that these systems consistently show emission in three different biological windows and evaluated their applicability as temperatures sensors in different temperature ranges.  In particular, we probed the dependence of their optical emission on the applied magnetic field, as shown in the figure below. These measurements allowed us to describe the energy transfer processes in this kind of mulit-shell nanoparticle system.

This type of nanostructure is very interesting for multi-functional materials fabrication since they can be employed in magnetic field and temperature sensing applications. Our work was published in Nanoscale. To read article HERE.