High‐Motility Visible Light‐Driven Ag/AgCl Janus Micromotors
Abstract
Visible light‐driven nano/micromotors are promising candidates for biomedical and environmental applications. This study demonstrates blue light‐driven Ag/AgCl‐based spherical Janus micromotors, which couple plasmonic light absorption with the photochemical decomposition of AgCl. These micromotors reveal high motility in pure water, i.e., mean squared displacements (MSD) reaching 800 µm2 within 8 s, which is 100× higher compared to previous visible light‐driven Janus micromotors and 7× higher than reported ultraviolet (UV) light‐driven AgCl micromotors. In addition to providing design rules to realize efficient Janus micromotors, the complex dynamics revealed by individual and assemblies of Janus motors is investigated experimentally and in simulations. The effect of suppressed rotational diffusion is focused on, compared to UV light‐driven AgCl micromotors, as a reason for this remarkable increase of the MSD. Moreover, this study demonstrates the potential of using visible light‐driven plasmonic Ag/AgCl‐based Janus micromotors in human saliva, phosphate‐buffered saline solution, the most common isotonic buffer that mimics the environment of human body fluids, and Rhodamine B solution, which is a typical polluted dye for demonstrations of photocatalytic environmental remediation. This new knowledge is useful for designing visible light driven nano/micromotors based on the surface plasmon resonance effect and their applications in assays relevant for biomedical and ecological sciences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Oct 07, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1002/smll.201803613
Entities
People
- Anh Nguyen
- Denys Makarov
- Franco Nori
- Gianaurelio Cuniberti
- Jacques Tempere
- Jin Ge
- Jürgen Fassbender
- Larysa Baraban
- Petr Formanek
- Tao Huang
- Vyacheslav R Misko
- Xu Wang
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Army Research Office
- Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology
- European Research Council
- German Research Foundation
- Harvard University
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
- Technische Universität Dresden
- University of Antwerp
- University of Michigan