Search results for " Nanoparticle"

Colloidally Confined Crystallization of Highly Efficient Ammonium Phosphomolybdate Catalysts

2018

Nanodroplets in inverse miniemulsions provide a colloidal confinement for the crystallization of ammonium phosphomolybdate (APM), influencing the resulting particle size. The effects of the space confinement are investigated by comparing the crystallization of analogous materials both in miniemulsion and in bulk solution. Both routes result in particles with a rhombododecahedral morphology, but the ones produced in miniemulsion have sizes between 40 and 90 nm, 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the ones obtained in bulk solution. The catalytic activity of the materials is studied by taking the epoxidation of cis-cyclooctene as a model reaction. The miniemulsion route yields APM particles ca…

Tuning Selectivities in Gas Separation Membranes Based on Polymer-Grafted Nanoparticles

2020

Polymer membranes are critical to many sustainability applications that require the size-based separation of gas mixtures. Despite their ubiquity, there is a continuing need to selectively affect the transport of different mixture components while enhancing mechanical strength and hindering aging. Polymer-grafted nanoparticles (GNPs) have recently been explored in the context of gas separations. Membranes made from pure GNPs have higher gas permeability and lower selectivity relative to the neat polymer because they have increased mean free volume. Going beyond this ability to manipulate the mean free volume by grafting chains to a nanoparticle, the conceptual advance of the present work is…

Silica-coated superparamagnetic nanoparticles as contrast agent for magnetic resonance imaging: Synthesis and physicological charaterizations

2015

Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) have received a growing interest for various biomedical applications due to their interesting magnetic properties. Herein, we report a method for facile synthesis of colloidal silica-coated superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (Si-SPIONs). The polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-SPIONs were successfully prepared and then coated with silica by the modified Stober method. The obtained Si-SPIONs are highly monodisperse with uniform morphology. Notably, comparing to uncoated SPIONs, silica coated ones show colloidal stability region at physiological pH which is applicable in biomedical applications and synthesis at the scale of grams was easily obta…

Zirconium oxocluster/polymer hybrid nanoparticles prepared by photoactivated miniemulsion copolymerization

2017

The photoactivated free radical miniemulsion copolymerization of methyl methacrylate (MMA) and the zirconium oxocluster Zr4O2(methacrylate) 12 is used as an effective and fast preparation method for polymer/inorganic hybrid nanoparticles. The oxoclusters, covalently anchored to the polymer network, act as metal-organic cross-linkers, thus improving the thermomechanical properties of the resulting hybrid nanoparticles. Benzoin carbonyl organic compounds were used as photoinitiators. The obtained materials are compared in terms of cross-linking, effectiveness of cluster incorporation, and size distribution with the analogous nanoparticles produced by using conventional thermally induced free …

Self-assembled metal-oxide nanoparticles on GaAs: infrared absorption enabled by localized surface plasmons

2021

Abstract Metal-oxides hold promise as superior plasmonic materials in the mid-infrared compared to metals, although their integration over established material technologies still remains challenging. We demonstrate localized surface plasmons in self-assembled, hemispherical CdZnO metal-oxide nanoparticles on GaAs, as a route to enhance the absorption in mid-infrared photodetectors. In this system, two localized surface plasmon modes are identified at 5.3 and 2.7 μm, which yield an enhancement of the light intensity in the underlying GaAs. In the case of the long-wavelength mode the enhancement is as large as 100 near the interface, and persists at depths down to 50 nm. We show numerically t…

Ferulic Acid-Loaded Lipid Nanostructures as Drug Delivery Systems for Alzheimers Disease: Preparation, Characterization and Cytotoxicity Studies

2009

Off-Resonant Optical Excitation of Gold Nanorods: Nanoscale Imprint of Polarization Surface Charge Distribution

2011

International audience; We report on the nanoscale optical characterization of gold nanorods irradiated out of their plasmonic resonance. Our approach is based on the reticulation of a photopolymerizable formulation locally triggered by enhanced electromagnetic fields. The tiny local field enhancement stems from the surface polarization charges associated with the electric field discontinuity at the metal/dielectric interface. This allows us to get a nanoscale signature of the spatial distribution of the surface charge density in metallic nanoparticles irradiated off-resonance.

Direct optical measurement of light coupling into planar waveguide by plasmonic nanoparticles

2012

Coupling of light into a thin layer of high refractive index material by plasmonic nanoparticles has been widely studied for application in photovoltaic devices, such as thin-film solar cells. In numerous studies this coupling has been investigated through measurement of e.g. quantum efficiency or photocurrent enhancement. Here we present a direct optical measurement of light coupling into a waveguide by plasmonic nanoparticles. We investigate the coupling efficiency into the guided modes within the waveguide by illuminating the surface of a sample, consisting of a glass slide coated with a high refractive index planar waveguide and plasmonic nanoparticles, while directly measuring the inte…

A DNA-nanoparticle actuator enabling optical monitoring of nanoscale movements induced by an electric field.

2018

Merging biological and non-biological matter to fabricate nanoscale assemblies with controllable motion and function is of great interest due to its potential application, for example, in diagnostics and biosensing. Here, we have constructed a DNA-based bionanoactuator that interfaces with biological and non-biological matter via an electric field in a reversibly controllable fashion. The read-out of the actuator is based on motion-induced changes in the plasmon resonance of a gold nanoparticle immobilized to a gold surface by single stranded DNA. The motion of the gold nanoparticle and thus the conformational changes of the DNA under varying electric field were analyzed by dark field spect…

Atomic force microscopy and Raman investigation on the sintering process of amorphous SiO2 nanoparticles

2010

We report an experimental investigation on the sintering process induced in fumed silica powders by isochronal thermal treatments at T=1270 K. Three types of fumed silica are considered, consisting of amorphous SiO2 (a-SiO2) particles with mean diameters 7, 14, and 40 nm. The study is performed by atomic force microscopy (AFM), to follow the morphological changes, and by Raman scattering, to obtain information on the concomitant structural modifications. The former method indicates that the sintering process proceeds by aggregation of single particles into larger grains, whose sizes increase with the thermal treatment duration. Furthermore, for each fumed silica type considered, the quantit…