Nanocomposites for Metal-Enhanced Fluorescence and Single Nanoparticle Sensing Platforms

The use of fluorescent nanoparticles as indicators in biological applications such as imaging and sensing has dramatically increased since the 1990s.1 These applications require that the fluorescent nanoparticles are monodisperse, bright, photostable, and amenable to further surface modification for the conjugation of biomolecules and/or fluorophores. Among the many types of fluorescent nano-particles available today, nanoparticles with core-shell architecture fulfill all these requirements, combining diverse functionalities into a single hybrid nanocomposite.2 In this work, we have developed core-shell (silver core-silica shell) nanoparticles with various shell thicknesses featuring a variety of fluorophores, to show the versatility of the core-shell archi-tecture, and have demonstrated their applicability for two platform technologies, metal-enhanced fluorescence (MEF) and single nano-particle sensing. We demonstrate the broad potential application