Abstract
Gold nanorods have the potential to be employed as extremely bright molecular marker labels for fluorescence, absorption, or scattering imaging of living tissue. However, samples containing a large number of gold nanorods usually exhibit relatively wide spectral lines. This linewidth limits the use of the nanorods as effective molecular labels, since it would be rather difficult to image several types of nanorod markers simultaneously. In addition, the observed linewidth does not agree well with theoretical calculations, which predict significantly narrower absorption and scattering lines. The discrepancy could be explained by apparent broadening because of the contribution of nanorods with various sizes and aspect ratios. We measured native scattering spectra of single gold nanorods with the confocal light absorption and scattering spectroscopy system, and found that single gold nanorods have a narrow spectrum as predicted by the theory, which suggests that nanorod-based molecular markers with controlled narrow aspect ratios, and to a lesser degree size distributions, should provide spectral lines sufficiently narrow for effective biomedical imaging.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1730-1738 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 2007 |
Keywords
- Confocal light absorption and scattering spectroscopy (CLASS)
- Nanorods
- Single particle
- Surface plasmon
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering