Polymers are a large chain of monomers. Nanoparticles are microscopic materials that have a large surface area. Nanocomposites are made up of polymers and nanoparticles, which are used for instrumentation. One type of instrumentation that can be used is Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS); however criteria needs to be developed for future nanocomposite research. We grafted a series of block copolymers to gold nanoparticles to investigate the distance-dependence of SERS. The block copolymers were composed of Poly(methyl methacrylate-glycidyl methacrylate) (PMMA-<i>b</i>-GMA). The copolymer series used an increasing amount of GMA (5-45 mol %) to determine the trend with the enhancement of SERS. It was determined that the enhancement of the probe signal was the greatest at the medium distance from the particle. Further research is ongoing.

Probing the distance-dependence of surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy using nanocomposites composed of raman reference and probe conjugated copolymers grafted to gold nanoparticles

255th National Meeting (2018)

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