“…Doped Si-NCs with diameter down to 3 nm have been synthetized using different strategies [89,90,110,111,112,113]. Among all, Fujii and coworkers developed an efficient procedure [114,115,116,117,118,119,120] where Si, SiO 2 , P 2 O 5 or B 2 O 3 were simultaneously sputter-deposited and then annealed in N 2 gas atmosphere. During annealing the B-or P-doped Si-NCs were grown in borosilicate (BSG) or phosphosilicate (PSG), i. e. B-or P-doped silica, glass matrices.…”