Orthogonal Emissive Upconversion Nanoparticles: Material Design and Applications.

Abstract

Upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) have gone beyond traditional fluorophores in a lot of fields due to the outstanding features such as sharp excitation and emission bands, chemical and photo stability of high quality, low auto fluorescence, and high tissue permeation depth of the near-infrared irradiation light used for excitation. Conventional UCNPs carrying single/multiple emissions under a single excitation wavelength can be only employed in concurrent activation, orthogonal emissive upconversion nanoparticles (OUCNPs) with the emissions, a kind of luminescence reliant on excitation, in which by switching the external excitation different lanthanide activators can adopt independent way to control the emission, is more like an ideal UCNPs nanoplatform which can switch their activated emissions depending upon the different application for which it is used at the right time when necessary. This review summaries what has been achieved on the synthesis optimization of designed OUCNPs in recent years and sums up various applications including bioimaging, photo-switching, and programmable control process. And also, the limitations OUCNPs face, and the efforts that have been made to overcome these limitations are discussed.