SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 6 - 8 may 2009

New Fellows Seminar

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Professor Paul Mulvaney FAA
ARC Federation Fellow, Bio21 Institute, University of Melbourne

Paul Mulvaney received his PhD degree at the University of Melbourne in 1989, working on surface electron transfer reactions with Professor Franz Grieser. He has worked as a research associate at the Australian National University Applied Maths Department (1988–89) and the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 1986–87, and 88. He was appointed as a research scientist at the Hahn-Meitner-Institute for Nuclear Research in Berlin from 1989-1992 with Professor Arnim Henglein, where he studied pulse radiolysis and the nucleation of nanocrystals. In 1993 he returned to the University of Melbourne as an ARC QEII Research Fellow, and he accepted a faculty position in 1996. In 1999, he spent time in Palo Alto with Quantum Dot Corporation. He was a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow in 2000 at the Max-Planck Insitute for Colloids and Surfaces in Golm with Professor Markus Antonietti, and again in 2005 at the CAESAR Nanotechnology Institute in Bonn with Professor Michael Giersig. His current interests include plasmonics, the optical properties of quantum dots, the use of nanocrystals as biochemical markers, quantum dot based LEDs and the use of nanomaterials for photovoltaics.

Not all that’s gold does glitter

In this talk, I will try to explain why the nanoscale holds so much fascination for materials scientists. I will show that even a simple material like gold behaves quite differently at the nanoscale. I will also describe briefly one of the interesting microscopy techniques used to study gold at the nanoscale. Gold can display many wondrous optical effects, and we are only just beginning to realise how to exploit these unusual phenomena.