Can street lights be replaced by trees? Taiwanese scientists believe that they can using gold nanoparticles to induce luminescence in leaves.
Yen Hsun Su and coworkers at Academia Sinica and the National Cheng Kung University in Taipei and Tainan have tackled this problem by synthesising gold nanoparticles shaped like sea urchins and diffusing them into plant leaves to create bio-LEDs.
Yuandi Li
Read this exciting Nanoscale paper today:
Influence of surface plasmon resonance on the emission intermittency of photoluminescence from gold nano-sea-urchins
Y. H. Su, S.-L. Tu, S.-W. Tseng, Y.-C. Chang, S.-H. Chang and W.-M. Zhang, Nanoscale, 2010
DOI: 10.1039/C0NR00330A
