Energy Transfer Sensitization of Luminescent Gold Nanoclusters: More than Just the Classical Förster Mechanism

Luminescent gold nanocrystals (AuNCs) are a recently-developed material with potential optic, electronic and biological applications. They also demonstrate energy transfer (ET) acceptor/sensitization properties which have been ascribed to Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and, to a lesser extent, nanosurface energy transfer (NSET). Here, we investigate AuNC acceptor interactions with three structurally/functionally-distinct donor classes including organic dyes, metal chelates and semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). Donor quenching was observed for every donor-acceptor pair although AuNC sensitization was only observed from metal-chelates and QDs. FRET theory dramatically underestimated the observed energy transfer while NSET-based damping models provided better fits but could not reproduce the experimental data. We consider additional factors including AuNC magnetic dipoles, density of excited-states, dephasing time, and enhanced intersystem crossing that can also influence ET. Cumulatively, data suggests that AuNC sensitization is not by classical FRET or NSET and we provide a simplified distance-independent ET model to fit such experimental data.