My phd

I joined Michel Orrit's lab in 2012 to do a Ph.D. as part of a 4-group collaboration together with groups of Biology, Biophysics, and Chemistry. The plan was to use gold nanoparticles as labels for tracking activity in the nucleus of the cell, specifically the nucleo-corticoid receptor.

Although the project derailed (it was too ambitious), I managed to put together four main topics of research. They were all focused on understanding and exploiting the properties of the light emission from gold nanorods when excited by a laser or white light.

The four main topics were:

• Temperature sensing with gold nanoparticles
• Background-free imaging of gold nanoparticles
• Tuning the light emission of gold nanorods
• Plasmon damping at different temperatures