Patent 9733184 was granted and assigned to Indian Institute Of Technology, Madras on August, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Composite materials comprising a mesoflower structure, methods of preparing the composite material, and methods of detecting heavy metal ion using the composite material are described herein. In some embodiments, a silica-coated gold mesoflower with a layer of silver quantum clusters may be capable of detecting Hg2+ ions in a sample at zeptomolar concentrations.