Förster resonance energy transfer mediated enhancement of the fluorescence lifetime of organic fluorophores to the millisecond range by coupling to Mn-doped CdS/ZnS quantum dots

UWE KAISER; NADEEM SABIR; CAROLINA CARRILLO-CARRION; PABLO DEL PINO; MARIANO BOSSI; WOLFRAM HEIMBRODT; WOLFGANG J PARAK

NANOTECHNOLOGY

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 27 p. 55101 - 55101

0957-4484

Manganese-doped CdS/ZnS quantum dots have been used as energydonors in a Förster-like resonance energy transfer (FRET)process to enhance the effective lifetime of organic fluorophores.It was possible to tune the effective lifetime of the fluorophoresby about six orders of magnitude from the nanosecond (ns) up to themillisecond (ms) region. Undoped and Mn-doped CdS/ZnS quantum dotsfunctionalized with different dye molecules were selected as amodel system for investigating the multiple energy transfer processand the specific interaction between Mn ions and the attached dyemolecules. While the lifetime of the free dye molecules was about 5ns, their linking to undoped CdS/ZnS quantum dots led to a longeffective lifetime of about 150 ns, following a non-exponentialtransient. Manganese-doped core?shell quantum dots furtherenhanced the long-lasting decay time of the dye to several ms. Thisopens up a pathway to analyse different fluorophores in the timedomain with equal spectral emissions. Such lifetime multiplexingwould be an interesting alternative to the commonly used spectralmultiplexing in fluorescence detection schemes.