0000000000409681
AUTHOR
Rui N. Pereira
Purification of Nano-Porous Silicon for Biomedical Applications
Recently, various bio-medical applications of nanoporous silicon (np-Si) have been suggested. This work investigates the biocompatibility of np-Si particles taking into account hazardous residua confined in the pores after preparation. The emphasis is on the potential application of such particles as oxygen photosensitizer for photodynamic therapy of cancer, which requires both negligible toxicity of np-Si particles in darkness and a high photo-cyto-toxic effect due to generation of singlet oxygen under illumination. Considerable amounts of water soluble toxic impurities are found to be present in the nanoporous shell of micrometer-sized np-Si particles immediately after their preparation b…
Light-induced nonthermal population of optical phonons in nanocrystals
Raman spectroscopy is widely used to study bulk and nanomaterials, where information is frequently obtained from spectral line positions and intensities. In this study, we monitored the Raman spectrum of ensembles of semiconductor nanocrystals (NCs) as a function of optical excitation intensity (optical excitation experiments). We observe that in NCs the red-shift of the Raman peak position with increasing light power density is much steeper than that recorded for the corresponding bulk material. The increase in optical excitation intensity results also in an increasingly higher temperature of the NCs as obtained with Raman thermometry through the commonly used Stokes/anti-Stokes intensity …