Microplasma-chemical synthesis and tunable real-time plasmonic responses of alloyed Au(x)Ag(1-x) nanoparticles.

Tunable synthesis of bimetallic Au(x)Ag(1-x) alloyed nanoparticles and in situ monitoring of their plasmonic responses is presented. This is a new conceptual approach based on green and energy efficient, reactive, and highly-non-equilibrium microplasma chemistry.

Self-organized Au nanoarrays on vertical graphenes: an advanced three-dimensional sensing platform.

A three-dimensional surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS)/plasmonic sensing platform based on plasma-enabled, catalyst-free, few-layer vertical graphenes decorated with self-organized Au nanoparticle arrays is demonstrated. This platform is viable for multiple species detection and overcomes several limitations of two-dimensional sensors.

PLUXter: rapid discovery of metal-organic framework structures using PCA and HCA of high throughput synchrotron powder diffraction data.

This paper reports on a systematic method--called PLUXter--developed for screening and data mining of large numbers of potential metal-organic framework compounds that have been synthesized then subsequently analyzed with high throughput synchrotron radiation X-ray powder diffraction. The first part of the method utilizes principal components analysis (PCA), which allows materials to be ranked in order of crystallinity so that undesirable amorphous materials may be identified and eliminated. The second part allows structural grouping within and between samples to be observed using hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Classification using a single linkage distance produced unsatisfactory clusters however the dendrogram's structural relationships were used to establish and guide the boundaries of groups. The resultant grouping identities allowed further structure-property studies to be undertaken on representative structures from the clusters, significantly reducing time and the use of resources.