A thermo-responsive rewritable plasmonic bio-memory by regulating single core-satellite gold nanocluster dissociation

A thermo-responsive rewritable plasmonic bio-memory chip has been successfully fabricated on an indium tin oxide (ITO) glass slide by assembling core-satellite gold nanoclusters with different size of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) using double-strand DNA (dsDNA) linker. And the prepared 70@DNA20@13 gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) exhibited more stable and greater photothermal conversion ability. With short time irradiation by 633 nm microbeam laser, every individual AuNCs could be excited and remove the satellite AuNPs on its surface. Especially, in the dissociation process of AuNCs with 3–5 satellite, its color would change from yellow to green, which showed more significant reduction in the red channel of the dark-field microscopy (DFM) images and could be defined to state “0” and “1” respectively. Besides, this plasmonic nano bio-memory could transform cyclically its state between 0 and 1 which exhibited excellent rewritable ability.