Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) have been widely applied as highly efficient luminescence quenchers in combination with a large variety of donor fluorophores. While the application of such systems in optical biosensing has resulted in significant advances of biological, biochemical, and biophysical research, the underlying energy transfer mechanism has been much less investigated. In this review, we discuss the differences between Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) and nanosurface energy transfer (NSET), give an overview of the literature concerning the assignment of FRET or NSET to AuNP-based luminescence quenching, show why the development of improved NSET models and their application to experimental data provided strong arguments in favor of the NSET formalism, and discuss applications of NSET in biosensing, molecular rulers, and molecular tension probes. Taking into account the existing literature, the NSET formalism, including size and wavelength-dependent issues, is superior to FRET theory for a general description of energy transfer to AuNPs.

金纳米颗粒（AuNPs）与多种供体荧光团结合已广泛用作高效发光猝灭剂。虽然这种系统在光学生​​物传感中的应用已导致生物学，生化和生物物理研究的重大进展，但对潜在的能量转移机制的研究却很少。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了Förster共振能量转移（FRET）和纳米表面能量转移（NSET）之间的区别，概述了有关将FRET或NSET分配给基于AuNP的发光猝灭的文献，并说明了为什么改进的发展NSET模型及其在实验数据中的应用为支持NSET形式主义提供了有力的论据，并讨论了NSET在生物传感，分子尺，和分子张力探针。考虑到现有文献，NSET形式主义，包括大小和与波长有关的问题，在对向AuNPs进行能量转移的一般描述方面优于FRET理论。