Thesis

Production and optical properties of gold nano-clusters

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Awarding institution
  • University of Strathclyde
Date of award
  • 2013
Thesis identifier
  • T13394
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Department, School or Faculty
Abstract
  • This project investigated the optical properties of chemically synthesized gold nano-clusters (AuNCs) and creation of size selected AuNCs using physical method. In the chemical method, bovine serum albumin (BSA) was used to stabilize AuNCs. BSA-Au25 was synthesized with an emission band observed at around 600~700nm. The dynamical study revealed a slow decay process with a fluorescent lifetime found to be as long as 1.2μs. Moreover, this work studied the size of BSA-Au25 through fluorescence anisotropy measurement. The investigation on the size at different pH values revealed a dramatic change in particle size as pH reduced to 3.1, consistent with the change of BSA from N form to E form. This study suggests the possibility of exploiting fluorescent protein-gold nano-clusters to probe protein conformational changes. To investigate the size dependent fluorescence behaviour, a size selected nano-cluster source has been employed to produce bare AuNCs. So far, Au5 and Au8 have been observed. In the future, the optical properties of the bare AuNCs will be compared with that of BSA-Au25 to understand the fluorescence mechanism of AuNCs.
Resource Type
DOI
Date Created
  • 2013
Former identifier
  • 989419

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