Optimizing Nano-Oscillators
Summary
Measuring charges of single molecules is a difficult task. Especially small molecules inan aqueous environment are hard to characterize. One method to do this uses nano-oscillators, which are gold particles attached to a PEG molecule via a biotin-streptavidincomplex. In this thesis, these nano-oscillators will be constructed and optimized, afterwhich a potential will be applied to the system, which causes the particles to move.The observation of this movement will be carried out with a total internal reflectionmicroscope. We find that to construct the optimal slides, the ratio of biotin to non-biotin PEG molecules should be 1:1000, and the salt concentration of the gold particlesolution should be 20 mM. Further research can be done on the effects of the appliedvoltage, and the software used for analysis can be further refined.