abstract
Luminescent nanothermometry uses the light emission from nanostructures for temperature measuring. Non-contact temperature readout opens new possibilities of tracking thermal flows at the sub-micrometer spatial scale, that are altering our understanding of heat-transfer phenomena occurring at living cells, micro electromagnetic machines or integrated electronic circuits, bringing also challenges of calibrating the luminescent nanoparticles for covering diverse temperature ranges. In this work, we report self-calibrated double luminescent thermometers, embedding in a poly(methyl methacrylate) film Er3+-and Tm3+-doped upconverting nanoparticles. The Er3+-based primary thermometer uses the ratio between the integrated intensities of the H-2(11/2) -> I-4(15/2) and S-4(3/2) -> I-4(15/2) transitions (that follows the Boltzmann equation) to determine the temperature. It is used to calibrate the Tm3+/Er3+ secondary thermometer, which is based on the ratio between the integrated intensities of the (1)G(4) -> H-3(6) (Tm3+) and the S-4(3/2) -> I-4(15/2) (Er3+) transitions, displaying a maximum relative sensitivity of 2.96% K-1 and a minimum temperature uncertainty of 0.07 K. As the Tm3+/Er3+ ratio is calibrated trough the primary thermometer it avoids recurrent calibration procedures whenever the system operates in new experimental conditions.
keywords
UP-CONVERSION LUMINESCENCE; TEMPERATURE-DEPENDENCE; NANOTHERMOMETER; SENSITIVITY; EMISSION
subject category
Chemistry
authors
Brites, CDS; Martinez, ED; Urbano, RR; Rettori, C; Carlos, LD
our authors
Carlos Brites
Associate Professor
Luís Carlos
Full professorProjects
CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials (UID/CTM/50011/2019)
SusPhotoSolutions - Soluções Fotovoltaicas Sustentáveis (SUSPHOTOSOLUTIONS)
acknowledgements
Work was partially developed in the scope of the project CICECO-Aveiro Institute of Materials (Ref. FCT UID/CTM/50011/2019), financed by Portuguese funds through the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia/Ministerio da Educacao e Ciencia (FCT/MEC). Financial support of FCT (PTDC/CTM-NAN/4647/2014 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016687) is also acknowledged. This work was supported and performed under the auspices of the Brazilian agencies CAPES, CNPq, and Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo (FAPESP) through Grants #2011/19924-2, #2012/04870-7, #2012/05903-6, #2015/21290-2, and #2015/21289-4. CB acknowledge the grant financed by the SusPhotoSolutions project CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000005. EM acknowledge, respectively, the post-doctoral FAPESP fellowship #2015/23882-4 and BEPE #2018/12489-8.