Aqueous processes ranging from protein folding and enzyme turnover to colloidal ordering and macromolecular precipitation are sensitive to the nature and concentration of the ions present in solution. Herein, the effect of a series of sodium salts on the lower critical solution temperature (LCST) of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), PNIPAM, was investigated with a temperature gradient microfluidic d...

A previously perforated planar TEM specimen of silicon sample (8GLJH-060) was ion milled for 10s using two argon guns at an angle of 20°, 0.5mA per gun and a fixed voltage of 4kV. The time the specimen surface was in contact with air was minimized to 3min, by taking it out of the ion mill and putting it in the electron microscope airlock immediately afterwards. The silicon wafer was left in the...

The quest for nonoptical imaging methods that can surmount light diffraction limits resulted in the development of scanning probe microscopes. However, most of the existing methods are not quite suitable for studying biological samples. The scanning ion conductance microscope (SICM) bridges the gap between the resolution capabilities of atomic force microscope and scanning electron microscope a...

In this paper, we present the fabrication of nano optical elements by means of deep reactive ion etching technique (Bosch process) on a silicon-on-insulator substrate. The nano structures are fabricated in a two step process. The first step consists of direct-writing nanoscale patterns on PMMA polymer by electron beam lithography. These nano patterns are then transferred to the silicon surface ...

Ion implantation is a surface modification technology to produce new material on the surface by impingement of high energy ions from the ion accelerator. In this work, AISI 304 stainless steels were coated with 90 nm Ni film by electron beam deposition and implanted by a flow of 5×1017 N cm−2 at 400 K temperature with different implantation energies of 10, 20, 30 and 40 keV. The prepared sample...

Based on partially-coherent digital in-line holography, we report a field-portable microscope that can render lensfree colour images over a wide field-of-view of e.g., >20 mm(2). This computational holographic microscope weighs less than 145 grams with dimensions smaller than 17×6×5 cm, making it especially suitable for field settings and point-of-care use. In this lensfree imaging design, we m...