Surface motifs regulated aggregation induced emission in gold–silver nanoclusters

Abstract

Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) is a recently developed strategy to design highly luminescent metal nanoclusters (NCs), which can be controlled by the surface motifs [M(i)-SR] of NCs. This communication is an account to understand the AIE in gold silver (AuAg) NCs, where the Au(i)-thiolate motif is engineered by doping different amount of Ag in Au NCs. Investigation revealed the great impact of Au(i)-thiolate motifs on the AIE of AuAg NCs.