ABSTRACT
In many of these works, the thermosensitive microgels are combined with inorganic components such as quantum dots (Jaczewski et al. 2009), silver (Xu et al. 2006), gold (Kawano et al. 2009) or magnetic nanoparticles (Luo et al. 2010) to yield nanostructured and multifunctional hybrid material. The combination between the organic and the inorganic components establishes a symbiotic relation in which the microgels give colloidal stability as well as stimuli-responsive features, while the inorganic counterparts provide quantum properties such as photoluminescence (Agrawal et al. 2008; Bai et al. 2010), surface plasmon resonance (Karg et al. 2009), or magnetism (Schachschal et al. 2010).
