Author: Greg Madejski

Here are some more images from my ongoing cell culture project. My previous work and protocols: ZO-1 staining of confluent RPE cells on various MgF2 substrates I added twice the amount of primary antibody on these devices that I usually do (1:100 dilution, instead of 1:200).     High Porosity MgF2   TCP MgF2 Coverglass  

Many, many thanks to Kilean Lucas and Brian McIntyre who enabled our metrology. We have desired to get 3d information about the structure of our nanopores. One method to do so is known as electron tomography, a technique which can reconstruct volumes and surfaces from sets of tilted images. By identifying dense regions of contrast…

As the title states, I partially etched some different material (Wafer 2238, 100 nm NPN) to create nanofeatures with blown out holes. With a thicker membrane, we can blow out the pores more (etch longer) without compromising the strength of the material (with regard to templating purposes). These membranes were fractured and coated with 6…

This post is a continuation of the work in Partial Etch RIE Blows out NPN Pores and MgF2 Nanomembrane Fabrication on partially etched NPN substrates. We believe the underlying NPN template influences the shape of our SERS active nanostructures and therefore the SERS properties. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the structures resulting…

I’ve been culturing RPE cells over here in Rochester for my MgF2 fabrication paper, in which the goal is to make a permeable Raman compatible cell substrate. My previous work had shown polarization of RPE cells (via-ZO-1 staining) on nanoporous MgF2 nanomembranes, but in the meantime, I have reworked my MgF2 substrates to be thicker…

This work is a continuation of my last post, Partial Etch RIE Blows out NPN Pores, where I take the process a step further and deposit MgF2 onto the newly opened substrates. I used the same etch recipe to blow out the pores (0, 10, 20, 30, 40s) and then evaporated MgF2 onto these new substrates…

As the title states, this post is about shifting an arbitrary pore distribution in an NPN layer. Why would we want to do this? We believe that the underlying pore distribution and shape influences the properties of many of our devices (my SERS sensor work included). Jim has coined the term ‘bowl-with-a-hole’ to describe the…

Summary Statement: We have doubled our MgF2 yields (compared to nanoporous MgF2) by moving to thicker microporous membranes. While the increase in strength is more modest than initially expected, we have plenty of substrates for use in cell culture. Statistics: Window [mm] Average Std Dev Count 0.1 21.02 8.10 14 0.3 8.18 5.62 17 0.5 4.33…