1,721,010 research outputs found
A combined ElectroWetting on Dielectrics superhydrophobic platform based on silicon micro-structured pillars
No full textA simple and ready to use approach for combining silicon superhydrophobic surfaces with ElectroWetting On Dielectrics (EWOD) phenomenon is presented. The substrate is fabricated using a two-phases process, where a first optical lithography step is used to define the position of the micro-pillars and a second one exploits the characteristics of reactive ion etch Bosch technique. The fabricated substrate has been then coupled with a micro-manipulator tip to show the local changes mechanism of contact angle by applying very low DC voltages in the range from 5 to 30 V. The device can be of interest for a wide variety of microfluidics applications related to the biomedical field
Plasmonic nanoholes as SERS devices for biosensing applications: An easy route for nanostructures fabrication on glass substrates
No full textSurface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been largely exploited in the last decade for biochemical and biomedical research. But some issues still require attention before transferring SERS to bioclinical routinely practices, such as reproducibility, quantitative analysis and signal background interference. In this work we propose an easy and cheap route, based on a template stripping technique, for producing plasmonic nanostructured films with SERS capabilities. We focus our attention to nanoholes in a continuous gold film, conversely to the majority of the literature which is dealing with individual nanostructures. Plasmon resonances occur at the holes edges, thus enabling the possibility of SERS signals from biomolecules and the potential application as biosensors. One advantage of the nanoholes patterned film is the optical-subdiffraction pitch, which prevents any Raman and/or fluorescence signal arising from the bottom slide. This effect paves the way to standard glass slides, much cheaper than CaF2 ones, as suitable substrates for SERS devices, without any interfering signal coming from the glass itself
Electroless Deposition and Nanolithography Can Control the Formation of Materials at the Nano-Scale for Plasmonic Applications
No full textThe new revolution in materials science is being driven by our ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level to create structures with novel functions and properties. The aim of this paper is to explore new strategies to obtain plasmonic metal nanostructures through the combination of a top down method, that is electron beam lithography, and a bottom up technique, that is the chemical electroless deposition. This technique allows a tight control over the shape and size of bi- and three-dimensional metal patterns at the nano scale. The resulting nanostructures can be used as constituents of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) substrates, where the electromagnetic field is strongly amplified. Our results indicate that, in electroless growth, high quality metal nanostructures with sizes below 50 nm may be easily obtained. These findings were explained within the framework of a diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) model, that is a simulation model that makes it possible to decipher, at an atomic level, the rules governing the evolution of the growth front; moreover, we give a description of the physical mechanisms of growth at a basic level. In the discussion, we show how these findings can be utilized to fabricate dimers of silver nanospheres where the size and shape of those spheres is controlled with extreme precision and can be used for very large area SERS substrates and nano-optics, for single molecule detection
The Five Ws (and one H) of Super-Hydrophobic Surfaces in Medicine
No full textSuper-hydrophobic surfaces (SHSs) are bio-inspired, artificial microfabricated interfaces, in which a pattern of cylindrical micropillars is modified to incorporate details at the nanoscale. For those systems, the integration of different scales translates into superior properties, including the ability of manipulating biological solutions. The five Ws, five Ws and one H or the six Ws (6W), are questions, whose answers are considered basic in information-gathering. They constitute a formula for getting the complete story on a subject. According to the principle of the six Ws, a report can only be considered complete if it answers these questions starting with an interrogative word: who, why, what, where, when, how. Each question should have a factual answer. In what follows, SHSs and some of the most promising applications thereof are reviewed following the scheme of the 6W. We will show how these surfaces can be integrated into bio-photonic devices for the identification and detection of a single molecule. We will describe how SHSs and nanoporous silicon matrices can be combined to yield devices with the capability of harvesting small molecules, where the cut-off size can be adequately controlled. We will describe how this concept is utilized for obtaining a direct TEM image of a DNA molecule
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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