Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Sendova, Mariana

Area of Concentration

Physics

Abstract

Analysis techniques such as micro-spectrophotometry (MSP) and transmission electron microscopes (TEM) are useful in many fields, but each has their limitation. While TEM provides magnification of images allowing nanoparticle (NP) size measurement, field of view is too small to determine an overall size distribution. MSP allows characterize of materials by measuring surface plasmons resonances (SPR), and through Mie theory, one can calculate an associated NP radius corresponding to full width half max (FWHM) of the SPR band. Mie theory, however, assumes that all NPs within the system are spherical, non-interacting, and equal in size which is unlikely in practice. To gain insight on relative size distributions for multi-size NP systems we propose a study which combines experimental values from both techniques. QBMie software, is used to simulate spectral SPR bands for single NP size systems, copper (Cu) or silver (Ag). The SPR data is then used to simulate systems of two NP sizes, both Cu or Ag, with OriginLab software. Through graphical analysis, we derive formulas which determine the relative size concentrations of NPs in two NP size systems using only values obtainable via TEM and MSP. The scope of our study is limited to cases where the large NP has radius R = 10 nm, and the smaller NP has 2 ≤ R≤ 10, but serves as a step towards analyzing constituent properties of systems in more detail.

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