Optical Properties of Dyes Confined into Carbon and Boron Nitride Nanotubes for Multimodal Bio-Imaging

Abstract

Nanotubes attracted a lot of interest as 1D nano-porous materials for the encapsulation and aggregation control of organic dyes molecules. Indeed, the 1D confinement drives the stacking of the molecules inside and enables original aggregation effects on their optical properties (1,2). When encapsulated inside carbon nanotube, organics dyes such as 6T, exhibits for example a strong and specific Raman scattering but their luminescence is efficiently quenched by the nanotube (3). Here we show that the same dyes, when encapsulated inside boron nitride nanotubes (6T@BNNT) exhibits strong luminescence (4). Photoluminescence imaging experiments on individualized 6T@BNNT show that the encapsulation also circumvent the photobleaching issue over days under continuous photo-excitation. Finally we show that these hybrid materials, with specific luminescence and/or Raman fingerprints, can act as robust nanoprobes with reduced toxicity in living system such as Daphnia Pulex, for multimodal imaging from the visible to the near infrared range. (4) (1) E. Gaufrès et al Nature Photon. (2014) (2) S. Cambré et al Nature Nano (2015) (3) E. Gaufrès et al ACS Nano (2016) (4) E. Gaufrès et al (submitted)