Scientific Highlights

Nanostructures based on stimuli-responsive polymer and inorganic nanocrystals such as magnetic, fluorescent or metallic nanoparticles allow the development of multifunctional objects able to function as stimuli-responsive drug carriers and at the same time, acting as optical or magnetic probe thanks to the inclusion of inorganic nanocrystals within the same nanostructures. The presence of gold or magnetic nanocrystals would allow also the exploitation of such system as heat agents in thermal ablation therapy for the tumor treatment.

Organisation of spherical nanoparticles in three-dimensional superstructures is well advanced and many beautiful examples exist for binary, ternary and quasicrystalline superlattices. The formation of superstructures of shape-controlled nanoparticles is still at a very elementary level. However, our Department has developed various assembly techniques for nanorods, which exploit for example depletion forces and the formation of liquid crystalline phases at high volume fractions of nanoparticles.

Many types of fluorescent semiconductor nanoparticles are available nowadays such that the whole region of the optical spectrum from deep ultraviolet (UV) to several microns in the infrared (IR) can be covered (depending on the target application). However only a handful of metals showing useful plasmonic properties are available. Among these metals the most exploited are Ag, Au, Cu and Pt and mainly in the visible range and in the UV. Furthermore, systematic investigations of the IR response were reported mainly for Au-based nanostructures.

Fabricating new materials by self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks is one of the goals of modern materials science. Our Department recently synthesized a particular type of branched nanocrystal formed by a seed from which eight pods departed symmetrically, i.e. an “octapod” (its shape was determined by using tomographic reconstruction in the STEM).