Doped nanocrystals as plasmonic probes of redox chemistry.

A (nano)crystal-clear view: With doped semiconductor nanocrystals, local chemical events can be probed through their perturbation of the carrier density of the nanocrystal. Examples demonstrate that redox processes and ligand chemistry can induce changes in the vacancy density within copper(I) sulfide nanorods, allowing such events to be detected by strong shifts in localized surface plasmon resonance.