AWESOME WEEK!!

Finally made good gold nanoshells and gold nanoparticles that actually dried! Even more exciting, I got to see those particles under a scanning electron microscope!! I can tell you, if you’ve never seen how these machines work, you’re missing out. I am excited to show these to my students and explain how I got these images 🙂 Thank you Oara and Andres for taking the time to teach me so much!

So what’s the difference between nanoparticles and nanoshells? The short answer is size and preparation. The gold nanoparticles we prepared were made by adding 300 mL KCarb solution (which is made of 100 kg of potassium carbonate in 400 ml of water and 6 mL of gold) and 800 microliters of formaldehyde. When mixed thoroughly on a hot plate, the reaction changes from a clear to a blue solution first and then to red or red/orange depending on the concentration. For gold nanoshells, we used 180 nm Aminated Silica spheres to the gold colloids which is used to seed the shells and then added the KCarb and formaldehyde. Just like you can see the size difference between nanoparticles and nanoshells here, when we made the samples, I could only see a dot at the bottom of the test tube which were millions of nanoparticles. Nanoshells produced a little more in the test tube that you could actually see.
SAME NANOPARTICLES AND SHELLS AS ABOVE SEEN UNDER THE SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE

I even got to see the infrared spectrometer and see how the spectrum compares to the Raman spectra. Thank you to all that made it possible for me to have this experience. Truly AMAZING! So much more work to be done!! And only 2 weeks left 🙁

2 thoughts on “AWESOME WEEK!!”

  1. Great work and for graphing you are having separate program like in my lab I am using Isobat software.

  2. This is awesome! Love how you have all your pictures and data organized. Now the scanning electric microscope, what exactly does it show? I see the nanoparticles but are we looking at bonds or ions or what exactly?

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