Sam Mahler Summer Research 2023

 I missed last week, sorry about that! Week 4 was fairly uneventful, although I did start the new nanoparticle project. The synthesis starts with silver nitrate. The silver is separated from the nitrate in solution. A reducing agent is added to create the silver nanoparticles. Silica is used as the shell.  Because nanoparticles are so small, the only effective way to purify them is centrifugation. After most steps in the synthesis the product is centrifuged for 30 minutes to 1 hour. This can make the process boring and tedious at times, but I find that the final product makes it all worth it.  This is the nanoparticles after a round of centrifugation. The dark spot on the bottom of the tube is where the nanoparticles have aggregated. The solution retains a brownish color from reduced silver staying in solution, the purpose of the centrifugation is to "wash" the product and rid it of impurities.  After the addition of the silica shell this is our final product. These ...

 My supervisor is going to his military service for 3 weeks. In that time I'll be working with another researcher. We'll be working on nanoparticle synthesis, more on that next week. Today I will recap the research that I have worked on so far.  We synthesized the same ligand pictured in the second blog post (I'd include a picture here but something funky is going on with image uploads) and added different metals to the two coordination sites. Those metals were Copper, Zinc, Gallium, and Silver.  We were able to confirm structures using multiple methods including uv/visible light spectroscopy (UV/Vis), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), and infrared spectroscopy (IR). Today I worked with the chemistry department's crystallographer to try and obtain crystal structures for some of our compounds.  Once I figure out how to upload images I'll make another post with pictures, some of our compounds have some nice colors! Thanks for reading, have a great week....

      Today marks my second week in Switzerland. I'm enjoying the lab work. I've spent most of my free time wandering around the city and going on runs. I don't have anything incredibly interesting to talk about this week, so instead I'll talk about the languages of Switzerland.     Switzerland is a very multilingual nation, having four official languages; French, German, Italian, and Romansh. Fribourg sits on the border of the French and German speaking regions. Most of the city (~70%) speaks French with most others speaking a dialect of German called Swiss-German.   Having no French and only minimal German language skills, navigating my way in shops and restaurants has been an interesting challenge. While most people at the university have English proficiency, many natives speak only French. Swiss-German is quite different from the "High" German that I was taught. I've relied mostly on google translate and gracious french speakers. I may t...