SKKU: Prof. Sungho Park’s Team Designed Complex Au Nanorings with Interwined Triple Rings in a Single Entity
As global interest in sustainable energy increases, the importance of developing materials that can efficiently concentrates sunlight is increasing. Among them, plasmonic nanoparticles are essential materials for various application studies that require efficient conversion of light energy into electric energy or thermal energy, including applied research using light energy because they can amplify interaction with light.
The research team led by Sungho Park, professor of chemistry at Sungkyunkwan University (first author: Sungjae Yoo) is actively working on developing nanoframe materials with maximized structural complexity to increase the physical and chemical properties of plasmonic nanoparticles. The team designed complex Au nanorings with interwined triple rings in a single entity to amplify the efficacy of near-field focusing in a solution phase for the first time.
Using the newly developed chemical reactions, the researchers rationally designed the multiple step synthesis method to control the internal nanogap distance of the triple nanoring structure and refine the shape of the frame structure, and further integrate four nanoring structures of different sizes inside a single particle.
The synthesized triple ring structure exhibited an enormously large enhancement factor (∼109) of Raman signals, which is more than 100 times compared to conventional plasmonic gold particles, while simultaneously showing high signal reproducibility and stability regardless of the direction of light incident in a single nanoparticle. This is an innovative material that presents a new paradigm in the field of plasmonic particles, recognized for its significant contribution to the commercialization of Raman optical analysis techniques.
Professor Sungho Park said “This study presents a methodology for controlling and analyzing nanoparticles and is expected to be widely used in various field such as nano, optical, sensor, bio, etc.
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) and was selected as the cover page of the Journal of the American Chemistry Society (Impact Factor: 15.419) in the field of chemistry and published online on August 9 (Mon).