Departmental Colloquium
- Title
- Nanotechnology Innovations at SRNL: Fundamentals and Applications
- Guest Speaker
- Simona E. Hunyadi Murph
- Guest Affiliation
- Savannah River National Laboratory
- Host
- Prof. Yiping Zhao
- When
- Thursday, February 11, 2016 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Location
- Physics Auditorium (202)
- Details
- Even though Nature provides us with an outstanding selection of materials that can improve our lives, their range and abundance is still surprisingly lacking in the contemporary world. The possibility of finding new and intriguing materials that can cure disease, help us explore and/or live in space, make us live longer and healthier lives, increase communications between people around the world, and discover new energy supplies is exhilarating. The promise of viable applications for the future lies in the ability of scientists to understand, generate and control materials at the nanoscale. The development of multifunctional nanomaterials opens up new avenues for the creation of multi-purpose technologies that can be used for numerous applications. Multifunctional nanoparticles take advantage of the physicochemical properties of two or more materials. This creates a new multifunctional composite nanostructure with tailored optical, surface, and structural properties which serve as a multimodal probing agent. Metallic nanoparticles (Au, Ag, Pt, Pd), metallic oxide nanoparticles (TiO2, Fe2O3, SiO2) or a combination of these will be the main focus of this presentation. Specifically, I will discuss our recent synthesis and characterization techniques used to create different size, shape, composition, and morphology of multifunctional nanostructures. Representative applications pertinent to chemical sensing, imaging, and environmental cleaning, etc. of these advanced nanostructures will be described.