Self-Spreading of Lipid Bilayer on a Hydrophobic Surface Made by Self-Assembled Monolayer with Short Alkyl Chain.

Behaviors of self-spreading of lipid bilayer membrane on a glass surface modified with self-assembled monolayer (SAM) with short alkyl chain were observed with fluorescence microscopy. Hydrophobic surface made by SAM was found to hamper the self-spreading phenomenon but the lipid bilayer spread on a hydrophilic one where SAM was decomposed by oxidation. On a binary surface having a hydrophobic region and a hydrophilic one, the lipid bilayer spread on the hydrophilic region but it stopped at the boundary of the hydrophobic region.

Direct fabrication of nanopores in a metal foil using focused ion beam with in situ measurements of the penetrating ion beam current.

A through hole with a diameter less than 100 nm was fabricated in an Ag foil using only a focused ion beam (FIB) system and in situ measurements of the penetrating ion beam. During the drilling of the foil by a FIB of Ga(+) ions, the transmitted part of the beam was measured with an electrode mounted on the back face of the foil. When the beam current penetrating through the nanopore reached a certain value, irradiation was stopped and the area of the created aperture was measured with a scanning electron microscope. The resulting area was correlated with the current of the penetrating ion beam. This suggests that we can fabricate a nanopore of the desired size by controlling the ion beam via penetrating ion beam measurements. The smallest aperture thus created was circular with diameter of 30 nm.

Effects of the surface pressure on the formation of Langmuir-Blodgett monolayer of nanoparticles.

The effects of the surface pressure on the particle arrangement of Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) monolayers of alkanethiol-capped gold nanoparticles were studied. The LB monolayers were prepared from a highly concentrated particle solution, which increases film fabrication efficiency but readily causes small particle voids in the particle array. Overcompressing the LB monolayer to a high surface pressure restructured the particles and eliminated the voids. When the gold particles capped by dodecanethiol were 8.5 nm in diameter, the particle arrangement was vastly improved and a wafer-scale LB monolayer was transferred onto a substrate at the surface pressure of 20 mN/m.