Hello! As I publish this blog, I am overwhelmed with emotions. Excitement to get back to my loved ones, sadness that the time I have spent here has gone too fast, and a bit a relief from knowing I’ve put all of my effort and more into making this opportunity worthwhile. Even though this will not be my last blog, it was my last full week of interning at Professor Baldelli’s lab and experiencing University of Houston. I have a total of three days left, two will be spent in lab, tomorrow will be spent taking shelter from an approaching hurricane.
UPDATE: Hurricane Beryl destroyed campus as well as downtown Houston. Power is down but is restored deeper within UH campus premises. There was another alert sent out Monday that all activities will remain closed until Wednesday, so I will not be able to do research for another day.
My last full week consisted of preparing my poster presentation carried over from last week. In my poster is an overview of what I have been doing for the last four weeks. You can view it below!
For the presentation, the Welch Foundation interns and Joseph and I set up in one of the science building lobbies. It was a little over two hours of a gallery type presentation where people came up to you and you went over your poster. It was also very nice to see what the other interns were doing!
On Saturday, we all gathered under Professor Baldelli’s guidance and each intern did an elevator talk. We had a total of five minutes to explain what research and results we acquired through our time spent interning here.
Besides presenting, I did get to do some experiments to try to improve the etching and etching rate of gold. Originally, I was doing 1 M KOH/0.1 M KCN and etching wasn’t quite working properly. My grad student had explained it was possibly the concentration of KCN so we made a 0.2 M and a 0.5 M KCN solution. After running through the experimental process of stamping the gold with octadecanethiol (ODT) for five minutes and immersing the sample in a mixed solution of 1 M KOH/0.2 or 0.5 M KCN, I concluded that 0.5 M KCN improved the etching of bare gold. However, the etching rate is still extremely high at three hours when it should etch completely in seven to fifteen minutes.
This is the etching of two gold samples in a 1 M KOH/0.5 M KCN solution after two hours and thirty minutes. The bottom of both gold samples is where I stamped octadecanethiol (ODT) on the surface. At the top of both samples is the location of bare gold, which is etching and revealing what is called the silicon wafer.
A silicon wafer is a layer of material important for manufacturing semiconductors. Semiconductors are found in various electronic devices. If you go back to the Introduction of my poster, you will see some applications including plant protection and renewable energy that uses small devices manufactured from microcontact printing processes.
For my last two days of research, my goal is to determine the optimal concentration of KCN for proper etching of gold.
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