About the group

     Our primary research interests are to discover or create an ensemble of nanostructures with specific size, shape, and arrangement on particular positions on a well defined solid surface; and to explore the unique physical and chemical properties of such an ensemble. These subjects are considered to be among the most fundamentally important issues in the exploration of nanoscience and realization of nanotechnology. We have been exploring and exploiting the concept of ‘constrained self-organization’, which means to impose a set of constraining rules on a particle self-organization process in order to select a small desired subgroup from numerous possible outcomes of the process. The concept is attractive for realizing the dream of nanotechnology, i.e., to be able to quickly manipulate materials on the atomic scale, because ‘constrained self-organization’ is intrinsically a massive parallel process that is necessary for any viable technology aimed to create a large array of identical nanostructures with atomic scale precision in a reasonable time scale. For example, we discovered the formation surface magic clusters (SMC), i.e., clusters exhibiting enhanced stability at certain magic numbers and and ion/electron beam lithography methods to create novel nanostructures arrays of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanochannels with custom-designed geometry. We use AAO as templates to grow arrays of Ag nanoparticles and nanowires. The former is used to enhance the Raman signals of molecules on their surfaces while the latter is used as nanowire-based plasmonic metamaterials exhibiting negative refraction. Specifically, we are interested in using the Ag-nanoparticle arrays for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) of bacteria and SERS-based bacteria identification and bacteria antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) for sepsis patients.

Contact

For more information, please contact us (Dr. Yuh-Lin Wang's page) or by phone (886) 2-2366-8241 (Lab).

For visitors' information, our laboratory (NB02) is located inside the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences Building, which is in the central region of the National Taiwan University campus, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC.