This is written at the conclusion of my SURI 2016 research on my last day of actual research, that means that every result from this summer is included in this synopsis.
What we learned this summer:
- Gold nano particles are not our friends, they are angry and spiteful.
- pH doesn’t really effect them
- Sonication vs rotator, well we still aren’t sure but sonicator is probably better
- They don’t keep at all, more than 12 hours will probably ruin them
- They look the same to the UV Vis whether they are made by LBL or by APTES
- APTES will fail when the thiol on the gold surface is too hydrophobic
- Hexanethiol and Octanethiol will capture and detect M-Xylene
- Proof of concept, not really practical
- They are our current best hope for detection
- 2,4-D fluoresces a lot and doesn’t like getting caught in the monolayers that we made so far, this makes it a pain to use the spectrometer on
- Detection is proven! We know that the theory actually works!
Where do we go from here?
- Going to use Scanning Electron Microscope and Atomic Force Microscope to see the quality of the gold coating
- Going to try mixed monolayers to try and capture a wider variety of molecules
- May use vortexer or centrifuge to get molecules to stick into the thiol coating
- Going to continue troubleshooting why the nano particles are not consistent
Here is my power point presentation as a supplementary addendum to the conclusion of my research.