Simultaneous Guidance of Intraoperative Tumor Resection by Near-Infrared-II Imaging Combined with Complementary Surface-Enhanced Raman Imaging via Janus Au-PbS Nanoparticles

The development of sophisticated nanomaterials with synergistically enhanced functionalities and applications has been greatly promoted via the construction of Janus nanoparticles with controlled compositions. In this work, we described and demonstrated the formation of Janus Au-PbS nanoparticles (NPs) by Au NPs-mediated spontaneous epitaxial nucleation and growth. The mechanism of formation of Janus Au-PbS NPs was investigated in detail. Then, we also found that there was a strong electronic interaction between the Au NPs and PbS quantum dots (QDs) in Janus Au-PbS NPs, where electrons were transferred from the Au NPs domain to the PbS QDs domain. Moreover, the Janus Au-PbS NPs integrated the high-brightness tunable second near-infrared (NIR-II) photoluminescence emission and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), which achieved good intraoperative tumor resection. This complementary dual-functional imaging had the potential to enable more accurate tumor imaging and resection.