My research is focused on using gold nano-particles in conjunction with a ligand monolayer to detect contaminants in water using a Raman Spectrometer.  The vials are relatively cheap and easy to produce so it will make water testing much cheaper than sending samples to a lab.  The other big advantage is the portability of the Raman Spectrometer, this means that a handheld device can potentially replace an entire water treatment lab worth of equipment.  The hope is that water purity tests will be able to be doe much faster and in the field whether it be for detection of contaminants after a chemical spill or simply testing the water supply for a remote town to ensure that the water is potable.

The Raman Spectrometer works by exciting molecules and detecting when photons do not fall back to their original energy state.  While this is a fairly rare and hard to detect phenomena we are using surface enhancements that consist of a gold nano-particle surface with organic chain ligands attached to create a monolayer.  The monolayer is hydrophobic but has an entrapment quality that latches onto contaminants so as to hold them in place for the spectrometer to take a reading of them.  The spikes in the resulting spectra give us a fingerprint for each molecule, this means that it will be very easy to identify certain molecules simply by comparing a known spectra to a sample’s spectra.