Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Commons^™

Engineering Electromagnetic Systems For Next-Generation Brain-Machine Interface, Brayan Ricardo Navarrete

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

MagnetoElectric Nanoparticles (MENPs) are known to be a powerful tool for a broad range of applications spanning from medicine to energy-efficient electronics. MENPs allow to couple intrinsic electric fields in the nervous system with externally controlled magnetic fields. This thesis exploited MENPs to achieve contactless brain-machine interface (BMIs). Special electromagnetic devices were engineered for controlling the MENPs’ magnetoelectric effect to enable stimulation and recording. The most important engineering breakthroughs of the study are summarized below.

(I) Metastable Physics to Localize Nanoparticles: One of the main challenges is to localize the nanoparticles at any selected site(s) in the brain. The fundamental …

Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (Sers) As A Nanoscale Adsorption Phenomenon: Development Of Tailored Nanomaterials For Applications In Drug Detection, Chiara Deriu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) is an analytical technique in which nanostructured substrates amplify the inherently weak Raman signal of an adsorbed species by several orders of magnitude, enabling the detection of trace compounds, up to the single molecule level. While this may be an exceptional tool for any analytical scientist, SERS is at present relegated to the role of academic sensation, and is underutilized in everyday analytical practice. The SERS community is increasingly attributing this setback to a poor understanding of nanoscale surfaces and their chemical environment; since molecular adsorption at the nanostructured surface enables SERS detection, uncertainty about …