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Wendy Li, Week 2-3


It is now coming to the end of my third week in lab. Life was great here except that there was a major problem popping up in my research in past two weeks. What I wanted to do was to try to spin coat gold nanorods onto the surface of polystyrene film. Yet, most of the nanorods cannot stay on the film after spin coating since the polystyrene film was super hydrophobic. To solve this problem, numbers of solutions were thus proposed. I first tried to let the gold nanorod solution sit on PS film for 5-10 minutes before spin coating. Further, I applied plasma treatment to PS film which allowed the film surface to be hydrophilic shortly. However, these methods still did not offer me desirable nanorods dispersion. In addition to spin coating, I also tried drop casting. Through dropping the gold nanorods solution and allowing it to evaporate naturally, the gold nanorods can be preserved on film surface. Though I did detect lots of nanorods on the drop casted film via AFM scanning, they were mostly clustered and there were lots of crystals formed on the film surface. Hence, the problem I need to deal with next week would be how to make the nanorods distribute evenly on the film.

After my lab work, I went out with friends to explore the food around UPenn. The bubble tea store on 38 St, Han Dynasty on Market St, the Ochatto hot pot and BBQ, and U Town on 40 St are all worth trying.

Figure. AFM image 

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