On May 30th, 2012, Prof. XU Qinghua from Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, visit SINANO and delivered a talk entitled “Nanocomposite Materials for Two-photon Excitation Applications”. The presentation was chaired by Prof. CHEN Liwei, the deputy director of SINANO. Researchers and graduated students attended the lecture.

Two-photon excitation techniques have unique advantages, such as 3-D selectivity and deep penetration into biological tissues, compared to their one-photon counterparts. Prof. Xu presented recent research progress of his group on nanocomposite materials with enhanced two-photon excitation properties and their various applications. They used two different strategies to develop nanocomposites with enhanced two-photon properties. One method is based on energy transfer from conjugated polymers, which have large two-photon absorption cross sections. They have used conjugated polymers as two-photon light harvesting complexes to develop schemes for two-photon sensing, imaging and photodynamic therapy. The second approach is to develop plasmon engineered nanocomposite materials. Noble metal nanoparticles are known to display interesting phenomenon called Plasmon resonance, which could be utilized to develop nanocomposite materials with significantly enhanced optical properties. They have developed various metal nanocomposites with enhanced two-photon excitation emission and the applications in two-photon sensing.

Prof. Xu @ Presentation

Attendants @ Lecture