We demonstrate a convenient and cost-effective chemical approach for fabricating highly ordered Au nanoparticle arrays with sub-10-nm interparticle gaps. Near-field enhancements inside the interparticle gaps create uniform periodic arrays of well-defined "hot spots" exploitable for large surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) enhancements. A cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) bilayer sur...

Nanoparticles can catalyze many important chemical transformations in organic synthesis, pollutant removal, and energy production. Characterizing their catalytic properties is essential for understanding the fundamental principles governing their activities, but is challenging in ensemble measurements due to their intrinsic heterogeneity from their structural dispersions, heterogeneous surface ...

Effect of Fe and Au/Fe nanoparticles on the growth of UH-biosurfactant producing bacteria-Serratia, and the biosurfactant production was studied. Results showed that at a concentration of 1 mg/L of Fe nanoparticle, Serratia colony number increased by 57%, and biosurfactant production increase by 63%. Test result showed that Fe nanoparticles in the range of 1~10 mg/L had a positive impact on the...

A nanogap formed by a metal nanoparticle and a flat metal substrate is one kind of “hot site” for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The characteristics of a typical nanogap formed by a planar Au and either an Au and Ag nanoparticle have been well studied using 4-aminobenzenethiol (4-ABT) as a probe. 4-ABT is, however, an unusual molecule in the sense that its SERS spectral feature is de...

Noble metal nanoparticles possess very large scattering cross-sections, which make them useful as tags in biosensing assays with the potential to detect even single binding events. In this study, we investigated the effects of nanoparticle size on the shift in the light scattering spectrum following formation of Au-Au, Ag-Ag or Ag-Au dimers using FDTD simulations. We discuss the use of a color ...

This paper details the fabrication process for placing single-layer gold (Au) nanoparticles on a planar substrate, and investigation of the resulting optical properties that can be exploited for nonlinear optics applications. Preparation of Au nanoparticles on the substrate involved electron beam deposition and subsequent thermal dewetting. The obtained thin films of Au had a variation in thick...

The optical properties of core-shell nanoparticles consisting of a ZnO shell grown on Ag and Au nanoparticle cores by a solution method have been investigated. Both the ZnO/Ag and ZnO/Au particles exhibit strongly enhanced near-band-edge UV emission from the ZnO when excited at 325 nm. Furthermore, the UV intensity increases with the metal nanoparticle concentration, with 60-fold and 17-fold en...

The activity of Au nanoparticle-loaded P25 TiO2 (Au/P25) plasmonic photocatalysts, evaluated by the oxidative decomposition of formic acid in water under visible light irradiation, was enhanced up to 3 times by simply mixing Au/P25 with photocatalytically inactive h-BN nanosheets as a result of electron transfer from photoexcited Au/TiO2 to the h-BN nanosheets and retardation of the charge reco...

Floating gate memory devices were fabricated using well-ordered gold nanoparticle/block copolymer hybrid films as the charge trapping layers, SiO(2) as the dielectric layer, and poly(3-hexylthiophene) as the semiconductor layer. The charge trapping layer was prepared via self-assembly. The addition of Au nanoparticles that selectively hydrogen bond with pyridine in a poly(styrene-b-2-vinyl pyri...

Heterogeneous catalysis is of paramount importance in chemistry and energy applications. Catalysts that couple light energy into chemical reactions in a directed, orbital-specific manner would greatly reduce the energy input requirements of chemical transformations, revolutionizing catalysis-driven chemistry. Here we report the room temperature dissociation of H(2) on gold nanoparticles using v...