Chemiluminometric fingerprints for identification of plasmonic nanoparticles.

Development of a convenient and inexpensive method for identification and detection of nanoparticles (NPs) is of great interest. In this work, we have developed a novel and simple chemiluminescence based sensor array, with its sensing mechanism mimicking that of olfactory and gustatory systems for discriminating a set of NPs. The proposed method is based on the enhancement effect of NPs on luminol-oxidant CL intensity by their catalytic effect. Three kinds of oxidant including H2O2, AgNO3, and K3Fe(CN)6 were used as sensor elements and NPs exhibited diverse enhancing responses to different oxidant-luminol CL systems producing unique response patterns that were identified through heat map and chemometric methods, including linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Five NPs have been well distinguished at various concentrations. In addition, this method clearly revealed a linear relationship between CL signal values and the concentrations of NPs for the quantitative detection of NPs. We believe that this type of CL sensor array can open a new way for facile discrimination and detection of different kinds of NPs.