Externally tunable dynamic confinement effect in organosilica sol-gels

The feasibility of using the pores of organosilica sol-gels for dynamic confinement of a luminescent molecule is demonstrated in this paper. The porous organosilica sol-gels act as reversible thermoresponsive materials which exhibit reduced pore volume at higher temperature and enlarged pores at lower temperature, which causes dynamic alterations in the nanoenvironment of encapsulated entities. A particularly remarkable feature of this system is that the temperature-dependent confinement effect provided by the gels is reversible and can be efficiently modulated by simply changing the temperature.