High contrast breast cancer biomarker imaging using upconverting nanoparticles

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death in women and has scope for improvement in treatment stratification. We report the use of high contrast UCNP staining to distinguish different levels of HER2 expression in HER2 analyte control and HER2-positive breast cancer tissue biopsies. A contrast of 40 was found as compared to the negative control and 25 as compared to conventional DAB staining

Ultrafast dynamics of type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dots

In this paper, room temperature two-colour pump-probe spectroscopy is employed to study ultrafast carrier dynamics in type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dots. Our results demonstrate a strong dependency of carrier capture/escape processes on applied reverse bias voltage, probing wavelength and number of injected carriers. The extracted timescales as a function of both forward and reverse bias may provide important information for the design of efficient solar cells and quantum dot memories based on this material. The first few picoseconds of the dynamics reveal a complex behaviour with an interesting feature, which does not appear in devices based on type-I materials, and hence is linked to the unique carrier capture/escape processes possible in type-II structures