Controlled assembly of gold and rare-earth upconversion nanoparticles for ratiometric sensing applications

In this paper, the Au nanoparticles and rare-earth (RE) upconversion nanoparticles (NPs) were respectively synthesized by using polyelectrolyte as the capping agents. Since the synthesized Au NPs and RE NPs had the similar size and surface conditions, Their mixture were employed in a pH sensing application. Benefited from the good spectral overlap between the RE upconversion emission bands and pH-tunable surface plasmon bands of the Au NPs, the pH-induced manipulation of green-to-red emission intensity ratio of the upconversion fluorescence was achieved in the Au-RE mixture. The results demonstrate a rapid ratiometric approach for pH sensing, which is more efficient than traditional sensing methods that depend on single intensity-based responses to analytes.