Silver Doping-Induced Luminescence Enhancement and Red-Shift of Gold Nanoclusters with Aggregation-Induced Emission.

A deep understanding on the luminescence property of aggregation-induced emission (AIE) featured metal nanoclusters (NCs) is highly desired. This paper reports a systematic study on enhancing the luminescence of AIE-featured Au NCs, which is achieved by Ag doping to engineer the size/structure and aggregation states of the AuI -thiolate motifs in the NC shell. Moreover, by prolonging the reaction time, the luminescence of the as-synthesized AuAg NCs could be further tailored from orange to red, which is also due to the variation of the AuI -thiolate motifs of NCs. This study can facilitate a better understanding of this AIE-featured luminescent probe and the design of other synthetic routes for this rising family of functional materials.