In-Situ Gold–Ceria Nanoparticles: Superior Optical Fluorescence Quenching Sensor for Dissolved Oxygen

Abstract

Cerium oxide (ceria) nanoparticles (NPs) have been proved to be an efficient optical fluorescent material through generating visible emission (~530 nm) under violet excitation. This feature allowed ceria NPs to be used as an optical sensor via the fluorescence quenching Technique. In this paper, the impact of in-situ embedded gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) inside ceria nanoparticles was studied. Then, gold–ceria NPs were used for sensing dissolved oxygen (DO) in aqueous media. It was observed that both fluorescence intensity and lifetime were changed due to increased concentration of DO. Added gold was found to enhance the sensitivity of ceria to DO quencher detection. This enhancement was due to optical coupling between the fluorescence emission spectrum of ceria with the surface plasmonic resonance of gold nanoparticles. In addition, gold caused the decrease of ceria nanoparticles’ bandgap, which indicates the formation of more oxygen vacancies inside the non-stoichiometric crystalline structure of ceria. The Stern–Volmer constant, which indicates the sensitivity of optical sensing material, of ceria–gold NPs with added DO was found to be 893.7 M−1, compared to 184.6 M−1 to in case of ceria nanoparticles only, which indicates a superior optical sensitivity to DO compared to other optical sensing materials used in the literature to detect DO. Moreover, the fluorescence lifetime was found to be changed according to the variation of added DO concentration. The optically-sensitivity-enhanced ceria nanoparticles due to embedded gold nanoparticles can be a promising sensing host for dissolved oxygen in a wide variety of applications including biomedicine and water quality monitoring.

Sensitive detection of dissolved oxygen in seawater by fluorometric sensing based on ZnO-NH2@SiO2 QDs

“…6d. The calculated K sv is 1334.83 M −1 in this work, which is considerably higher than 893.7 M −1 and 454.6 M −1 of previously reported Au-ceria NPs 14 and Al-ceria NPs 49 fluorescence sensing materials. Furthermore, the fitting results show that the detection sensitivity of ZNS-2 to DO in this study was 0.036 mg L −1 , which is higher than that of the other sensing materials used in the literature listed in Table 1.…”

“…Shehata et al reported gold-ceria nanoparticles for DO detection. 14 The results indicated that optical coupling between the fluorescence emission of ceria and the plasmon resonance on the surface of gold nanoparticles could improve the sensitivity of gold-ceria nanoparticles for DO detection, with a Stern-Volmer constant of 893.7 M À1 . However, the high price of gold is not conducive for practical applications.…”

Harnessing Nuclear Energy to Gold Nanoparticles for the Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy of Glioblastoma

“…The GNP-based pregnancy test to detect urinary human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) went on the market in the 1980s [6,7]. Owing to excellent optical and electrical properties, GNP and its composites are frequently used to develop sensing devices [8][9][10] and diagnostic kits [11,12].…”

Ratiometric Optical Fiber Dissolved Oxygen Sensor Based on Fluorescence Quenching Principle

“…Collisional quenching [16][17][18][19][20] between oxygen molecules and fluorescence or phosphorescence molecules in a support matrix is the basis for most optical fiber DO sensors. It has been demonstrated that optical fiber chemical sensors have superiorities over other DO sensors, such as ease of operation, cost-effectiveness, and anti-electromagnetic interference.…”