Gold nanoclusters based dual-emission hollow TiO2 microsphere for ratiometric optical thermometry

Abstract

In this work, we develop a novel dual-emitting hollow TiO₂ microsphere with high stability and attractive thermal sensitivity, which could work as nanosensor for accurately measuring temperature. This nanosensor is prepared through coating gold nanocluster (AuNCs) on the surface of carbon dots-doped hollow TiO₂ microsphere. As-prepared nanosensor shows characteristic dual-emitting property of carbon dots (CDs, blue fluorescence) and AuNCs (red fluorescence) under a single excitation wavelength. Moreover, upon increasing the temperature, the intensity of red emission from the AuNCs continuously quenched, whereas that of blue emission from the CDs remained nearly constant. The different response results in a continuous fluorescence color change from red to purple that can be clearly observed by the naked eyes. Thus, as-prepared dual-emitting hollow TiO₂ microsphere could be used as optical thermometry by taking the advantage of the temperature sensitivity of their fluorescence intensity ratio (red/blue) with high reliability and accuracy, which change considerably over the wide temperature range (20–80 °C) with small temperature resolution (∼0.5 °C). Additionally, this nanosensor is successfully applied in 10 mM buffered saline (PBS) solution with physiological temperature ranging from 20 to 45 °C, which suggests as-prepared dual-emitting microspheres have promising applications in vivo temperature sensing.