Antennas Guest Speaker Seminar: Scanning Probe Microscopy for thiolated NPs study

Presenter Dr. Nicolas Clement,  the Institute for Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN), University of Lille, France

Abstract

Nowadays, nanoparticles appear almost everywhere due to the vast number of applications in many different fields; from electronic nanodevices to nanobiomedicine. However, the characterization of many of their properties at the single particle level represents a real challenge for both experimental and theoretical studies. In particular, the interplay between mechanical and electronic properties of gold nanoparticles, also when they are covered with an organic coating, is still missing.
In this presentation, I'll introduce the technology that we have developed to exactly answer this critical problem: the growth of gold nanoparticles (NPs) with a well-controlled structure and a fixation to the substrate with an ohmic contact. In this way, we obtain gold NPs that are single-crystals with a structure close to ideal cuboctahedrons or truncated octahedrons, with a sub-10 nm scale flat top. This is instrumental to extract their intrinsic properties at single NP level. By using acombination of scanning probe microscopy techniques (STM, AFM, peak-force AFM, CAFM, KFM) and first principle calculations, we have determined the Young modulus of these gold NPs (much smaller than for bulk gold), shown that alkylthiolated NPs organize themselves as two phases and pointed out the strong role of stress and interfacial dipoles in their electronic properties. In the last part of my presentation, I'll introduce recent results and perspectives on redox-coated NPs, the use of Scanning Microwave Microscopes (SMMs) not only to assess the impedance of these nano-objects, but also to elaborate Microwave-assisted nanostructures.​

Biography

NICOLAS CLEMENT was born in 1977. He received the PhD degree in solid-state physics, from the University of Marseille, France in 2003.
From 2003 to 2005, he was a post doc researcher at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), Japan. He is actually a researcher at CNRS (centre national de la recherche scientifique) and he works at the Institute for Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN), University of Lille. His research interests are nanoscale devices, metrology, noise, molecular electronics, 0D ion-sensitive field effect transistors, biosensors and energy harvesting.
 
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