Posts Tagged ‘nanoparticles’
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November 27th, 2009
L’Oreal award for gold work
Great to see another award going to researchers working on gold. This time it is to Dr Zarina Aspanut Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur who has received one of three L’Oreal Malaysia For Women in Science National Fellowships for 2009. Each year, a jury panel chooses three recipients, who each receive RM20,000 as financial assistance to pursue their research work in Malaysia. The programme is jointly conducted with the Malaysian National Commission for Unesco and supported by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia and Higher Education Ministry.
Dr Aspanutf is looking at the fabrication and characterisation of embedded gold nanoparticles in silicon dioxide thin film for solar cell and sensor applications.
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November 12th, 2009
Another Thought Leader
Last month we highlighted AZoNano’s excellent Thought Leaders series. Here’s another one about the use of engineered membranes, including those using gold nanoparticles…..
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October 26th, 2009
Gold nanoparticles research secures Gates Foundation grant
Scientists from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, have secured a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a technique that employs gold nanoparticles to diagnose malaria. Their project is one of 76 grants announced by the Gates Foundation in the third funding round of Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative to help scientists around the world explore bold and largely unproven ways to improve health in developing countries. See the official press release here.
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October 15th, 2009
Most-cited Energy and Fuels
I’ve just received news of the Top 20 most-cited articles published in Energy and Fuels during the last three years and the list includes ‘Chemical Fluid Deposition of Pt-Based Bimetallic Nanoparticles on Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes for Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Application’ *. This paper describes how bimetallic formulations including platinum-gold display an efficiency to oxidize methanol to carbon dioxide at least 60% better than the monometallic Pt nanoparticle catalysts reported previously.
* Energy Fuels, 2007, 21 (4), pp 2268–2271
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September 23rd, 2009
Lead-free packaging with gold inks?
This open access paper published in the Journal of Electronic Materials investigated gold nanoparticle inks as potential candidates for lead-free packaging applications. The main advantage of the inks are the very low melting points, good conductivity compared to eutectic solders and excellent thermal stability/electromigration resistance. -
September 21st, 2009
The use of gold for fabrication of nanowire structures
A few weeks ago I mentioned IBM were growing silicon nanowires using gold nanoparticles. An excellent review of why gold is by far the most widely used seed particle material for growth of semiconductor nanowires has just been published by a team from Lund University (Maria E Messing, Karla Hillerich, Jonas Johansson, Knut Deppert and Kimberly A Dick) in Gold Bulletin.
The review explains that although a couple of other materials have been reported to successfully initiate growth of nanowires, gold is the most universal particle material, capable of seeding a variety of different types of nanowires at a wide range of growth conditions. In the review the group identified and described the production and deposition methods of different types of gold particles used for nanowire growth including:
gold particles made from thin films
aerosol-generated gold particles
gold particles made by lithographic methods
and colloidal gold particles.
They also discussed the different advantages and disadvantages of each particle type if the nanowires are to be used for large scale production of semiconductor devices and perhaps most importantly, the fundamental reason for gold being superior to other materials for initiating growth of nanowires. Their conclusion? The ability of gold to easily form alloys with the growth precursors, its inertness to oxygen and the high diffusivities through gold are all important and added together are what make gold such a suitable material for nanowire seed particles.
Schematic demonstrating particle-assisted nanowire growth. (a) The seed particles are formed/deposited on the substrate and (b) by heating the substrate to a desired temperature and introducing growth materials an alloy is formed. (c) When a supersaturation of the alloy particle with growth material is achieved, nucleation occurs at the particle-substrate interface. (d) Nanowire growth occurs at the particle-wire interface as long as growth material is provided. (e) By switching to growth conditions favoring planar growth radial heterostructures, known as core-shell nanowires, can be grown. (f) Nanowires containing axial heterostructures with very sharp interfaces can be formed by switching between different growth materials. (g) If a second generation of gold particles is deposited onto the as-grown nanowires and (h) the growth process is repeated, branched nanowires for formation of nanowire networks can be grown.Copyright: Gold Bulletin
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September 17th, 2009
Memories of the future
Electronic Product News has an interesting piece on the future materials and designs of computer memory. According to the article, a team at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore is working on a gold nanoparticle based technology for next generation memory:…the group, based in Singapore, has used gold nanoparticles and pentacene, an organic semiconductor compound, to develop organic, plastic memory devices. The plastic devices will be considerably cheaper to produce and more versatile than conventional silicon-based devices.
The article goes on….
The team reported that the stabilised gold nanoparticles were acting as charge nanotraps and believed that the simplicity in design and processing could lead to memory devices and circuits that could be integrated into low-cost, plastic electronics.
Earlier this year the BBC and other broadcasters gave a great deal of coverage to Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia who have exploited the optical properties of gold nanorods for data staorage – ‘300 DVDs on one disc’ was the common theme of the stories.
UPDATE – AZoNano have just published this thought leadership piece on a similar topic
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September 9th, 2009
Linking Innovation
One of the websites linking university IP with the outside world is ibridge network. Its packed with university technologies to try to attract commercial interest. One of the recent additions to the site is ‘Novel Gold-Nanoparticle Hydrogels for Bioprinting Applications’ from the University of Utah Technology Commercialization Office. This gold nanoparticle based hydrogel is proposed for use in bioprinting tissue engineering. -
September 4th, 2009
IBM growing nanowires
Nice story this week in the New York Times about IBM’s research on silicon nanowires grown using gold nanoparticles….
[IBM published some lovely work a year or so ago using gold nanoparticles for printing (here)]
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September 3rd, 2009
Bayer Innovator Award
Richard Holliday
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