Date of Award
Spring 2020
Document Type
Honors Thesis
Department/Major
Chemistry
First Advisor
Chaoyang Jiang
Second Advisor
Miles Koppang
Third Advisor
David Hawkinson
Keywords
Raman, SERS, gold nanostars, anti-counterfeiting
Subject Categories
Materials Chemistry | Other Chemistry
Abstract
Increases in the selling of illicit goods warrant a subsequent need for even more sophisticated methods to prevent counterfeit products from being sold. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has the potential to be a powerful tool to thwart counterfeiters because the unique security tags fabricated with this method are difficult to reproduce without knowing the “secret” recipes used in their preparation. In this work, gold nanostars are used as SERS active substrates since their branched structure allows for strong coupling between the light and plasmonic nanoparticles. As a result, Raman signals of trace amount of chemicals can be easily detected. The gold nanostars were used with different combinations of probe molecules so that unique anti-counterfeiting tags can be created. The reproducibility and uniformity of the SERS spectra for these tags were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA). These SERS tags have a great potential for a variety of anti-counterfeiting applications.
Recommended Citation
Curry, Samantha E., "Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering of Gold Nanostars for Encoding Molecular Information" (2020). Honors Thesis. 112.
https://red.library.usd.edu/honors-thesis/112