Current industrial technologies including informational, biological, and medical technology have their bases mainly on classical mechanics. The ever growing demands for the fabrication of smaller devices used in daily life and faster operation are pushing the limits of current classical mechanics based-technologies to meet the demands from both the general public and industry. Artificial inorganic nano-building blocks that will be key components of futuristic nano-devices have recently emerged as a promising candidate to overcome many of the limitations of the currently available technologies.
In this thesis, I present the development of novel inorganic nanobuilding blocks with well-defined geometry and unique nanoscale property and their utilization not only for in vitro detection of breast cancer cell lines diagnosis but also for in vivo diagnosis of breast cancer through dynamic targeting and imaging.
At the early part of this thesis (Chapter 2-4), the development of novel inorganic nano-building blocks via shape controlled syntheses based on colloidal molecular chemistry and elucidation of their growth processes are mainly discussed. Control of nano-building blocks in terms of size, shape, and composition is of great importance in materials chemistry due to their novel size and shape dependent nanophenomena arising from quantum confinement effects. If the shape of colloidal nanocrystals is systematically controllable, we can obtain the ability to synthetically tune the materials properties which make these materials useful and optimized for desired purposes.
As a model case study for the shape-controlled synthesis of nano-building blocks, I first selected cadmium sulfide nanocrystals (Chapter 2). CdS possesses two distinct crystalline structures which include isotropic zinc blende and anisotropic wurtzite. The crystalline phase of the nuclei is controllable by changing the crystal growth temperature, which is crucial for determining the final geometry of th...