About the Seminar: 

Chemiresistors are rising in popularity within the environmental and the medical fields. Their ability to sense changes in a chemical environment through vapors and solutions makes them versatile and desirable for many applications, such as monitoring contamination in municipal water supplies. Chemiresistors often contain some kind of sensing materials such as conductive polymers, metal oxides, and nanostructures. In the world of chemiresistors, using conductive nanomaterial as the functioning sensor medium is gaining traction. A good sensing material will have high conductivity, high surface area, high porosity, and densely populated active sites. All of these properties are found in linked gold nanoparticle thin films. The chemiresistors using these films function well enough, but there is a push to improve the sensing capabilities of chemiresistors- especially for biological applications. There is a drive to explore where the conductive properties of these films stem from, and how they can be optimized to improve the sensing capacity in chemiresistors. In experimental work by Schupp and coworkers, as well as theoretical work by Schafer and coworkers, the impacts of electron transfer, interparticle distance, and ligand/ particle orientation on conductivity is explored in an effort to probe how this property can be better exploited in chemiresistors. These works deeply dive into the most essential aspects of conductivity, and even though they come from seemingly separate realms of chemistry, the evidence from both clearly shows one massive factor that impacts conductivity within linked gold nanoparticle thin films.