Archive for the ‘Properties’ Category
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July 21st, 2010
Kavli lectureship article published
Last year Chad Mirkin of Northwestern was awarded the 2009 Kavli prize for his work in the field of nanoscience. He delivered his award lecture at the 2009 Fall MRS meeting in Boston, and has now published an article based on the lecture in this month’s MRS Bulletin. It’s well worth a look as it covers much of his group’s work using gold nanoparticles, and how this research is moving on to deliver novel applications in all areas of materials science.
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June 28th, 2010
Nanoscale gold coatings made easy
Last week I got chatting to Sang-Kee Eah of The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. His team have just published this nice paper in Langmuir, the surface science journal. The crux of the research focuses on the identification of a simple, quick and clean way of synthesising gold nanoparticles, and then depositing them reproducibly on a range of surfaces. Check out the paper or Dr Eah’s press release for more details. Or you could even see the team demonstrating their technique on YouTube! -
June 25th, 2010
Final day – SERS, lobsters and many new friends
Having never attended a Gordon conference before, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – they are generally considered to be as good as it gets, and my expectations were high. I wasn’t disappointed! It really was an excellent meeting, bringing together many famous faces and rising stars of the field. But best of all was the student/postdoc involvement – every poster session had a real buzz to it, and I know for a fact some exciting collaborations were formed.
Teri Odom (Northwestern) and Michael Natan (Oxonica) deserve a mention at this point – they conceived the event, and undoubtedly spent countless hours organising, planning, promoting and generally worrying about it. But it paid off, and every single person I spoke with said how much they thought of the meeting.
A quirky (and I think very sensible) part of the final day was spent discussing the next meeting. The first question was ‘should there be one?’ and the response to this was a unanimous ‘yes’. The location is likely to be the USA again (with Europe as a possibility). Michael becomes the chair, and Francesco Stellacci of MIT was voted into the vice chair position. We will work with Michael to ensure GOLD2012 and GRC2012 do not clash.
Scientifically, the day kicked of with talks under the banner of ‘Nanoparticles, the environment and energy’. Consideration was first given to safety, with presentations from Jim Hutchinson and Catherine Murphy. Plasmonics presentations followed with Stephan Link and Sang-Hyan Oh talking. The evening session focused exclusively on single molecule sensing and SERS, much of which was well beyond me scientifically but it provoked some great debate in the lecture theatre.
The final meal was pretty special too – keeping with the old GRC North Eastern tradition whole lobsters were served. They were so delicious a few attendees were caught going back for seconds, however I will of course never name names… -
June 16th, 2010
Solid gold… Or maybe not
As world cup fever starts to build through the early stages of the tournament, many of the team captains will be starting to dream of lofting that famous trophy over their head on final day. FIFA has always said the trophy itself is “solid gold”, but this claim has been questioned by a chemistry professor at the University of Nottingham as reported here. Gold is extremely dense, and thus extremely heavy meaning a trophy of this size would weigh far too much for the tradional hoisting after the final it is was indeed solid gold.If you are interested, and would like to hear a bit more from Professor Poliakoff on the chemistry behind the world cup trophy take a look at this short video on youtube.
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May 7th, 2010
Golden plastic
We’ve picked up on this interesting press release from the Queensland University of Technology, which is entitled ‘Gold nanoparticles enrich every day products’. The release details the work of Adrian Fuchs, a researcher in the department, who has just completed his PhD developing a way to disperse gold nanoparticles evenly through plastic. Such work has broad potential application, especially in fields such as catalysis, drug delivery, and novel coatings.
For a more in depth look at this work, see this recent publication in the journal Polymer
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May 4th, 2010
Gold-decorated carbon nanotubes
Two of the most commonly discussed nanomaterials are gold nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). In this review, written by Kurt Geckeler of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, potential applications of a combination of these two materials are discussed. The paper details how the attachment of metal nanoparticles to carbon nanotubes is new way to obtain novel hybrid materials with interesting properties for various applications such as catalysts and gas sensors as well as electronic and magnetic devices.
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April 28th, 2010
New Scientist shines the light
New Scientist has a nice article (apart from the ‘bling’ description!) on the use of precious metals and diamond in optical computing. It says:A team at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea, recently transferred data between computer chips using plasmons to channel a broadband light signal along gold wires. Some manufacturers, including Intel, are beginning to use connections of this type to replace conventional wiring in personal computers.
The ultimate aim, though, is to have light itself perform the processing in every microchip. Part of the trick here lies in the ability to generate pulses of light and switch them on and off at high speed, all in a tiny space. The smallest conventional lasers measure several hundred nanometres across and so are simply too big for the task. To compete with transistors, a laser would need to be less than 50 nanometres across, an impossibility with conventional designs.
Then last year teams of physicists in the US and China created the first examples of a device known as a spaser, which gets its name from the fact that it amplifies surface plasmons in a similar way to how a laser boosts light. The spaser has a gold core wrapped in silica and dye molecules. When it is switched on – using an external light source at present, though the goal is to use an electric current – the gold core ripples with plasmons. These excite the dye molecules, which emit light. This light in turn creates more plasmons. The result is a beam of light from a device tens of nanometres wide.
This concept was highlighted in the white paper WGC published a few months ago.
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March 29th, 2010
‘Cold welding’ of ultrathin gold nanowires
The latest issue of nature nanotechnology carries an interesting article detailing observations from US researchers on the occurrence of ‘cold welding’ in gold and silver nanowires. This is potentially a significant development, as the connections made during the welding process (which itself is facile and reproducible) are of a notably high quality. The authors suggest that when combined with other nano- and microfabrication technologies, nanoscale cold welding has considerable potential in providing a route to bottom-up assembly of metallic nanostructures
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March 8th, 2010
Colliding gold creates new matter
A never-before seen particle, called an anti-hypertriton, has been created for the first time during experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island, New York. Particles of gold were collided just short of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) and more than 100 million collisions were made to collect the data. The matter created during the experiments is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called “Big Bang”.
Unfortunately, we’re a bit short of particles physicists here at the WGC, so if you’d like to read more the work is available here as a science advanced online publication.
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March 1st, 2010
Black gold electroplating
NEW Black gold electroplating on the market!
There is considerable interest in black colour effects on gold jewellery. To date, this has usually been achieved by electroplating black rhodium or black ruthenium layers on carat gold items or by oxidation of special carat gold alloy compositions (see special gold colours on utilisegold.com ) Whilst black rhodium or ruthenium offer satisfactory black coatings, there has been a desire to have a real black gold. At last, Wieland GmbH, Germany, have produced one, called NEOPAL. This is claimed to be “an innovative new decorative surface treatment which deposits a high quality layer of deep black gold plating”. This is a ‘first’ in gold electroplating solutions. I have a ring plated in Neopal; it is a lovely bluish black colour that is very attractive. Neopal is easy to use, with a layer thickness of <10 microns, and has uniform deposition characteristics with a hardness of 60 – 75 HV. For further information, contact Wieland – www.wieland-international.com
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
Chris Corti
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