Physics Commons^™

Low Energy Positron Interactions With Biological Molecules, Indika Lasantha Wanniarachchi

Wayne State University Dissertations

Calculations of the positron density distribution which can be used for positrons bound to midsize and larger molecules have been tested for smaller molecules and subsequently applied to investigate the most likely e+e- annihilation sites for positrons interacting with biological molecules containing C, H, O, and N. In order to allow consideration of positrons bound to extended molecules with regions of different character and no particular symmetry, atom-centered positron basis sets of Gaussian-type functions were developed for positrons bound to molecules containing O, N, C, H, Li, Na, and Be. Testing shows that there is no need to scale the …

Diffusion Of Gold Nanoparticles In Synthetic And Biopolymer Solutions, Indermeet Kohli

Wayne State University Dissertations

Soft matter systems of colloidal particles, polymers, amphiphiles and liquid crystals are ubiquitous in our everyday life. Food, plastics, soap and even human body is comprised of soft materials. Research conducted to understand the behavior of these soft matter systems at molecular level is essential for many interdisciplinary fields of study as well as important for many technological applications.

We used gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) to investigate the length-scale dependent dynamics in semidilute poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-water, bovine serum albumin (BSA)-phosphate buffer, dextran and particulate solutions. In case of PEG-water solutions, fluctuation correlation spectroscopy was used to measure the diffusion coefficients …