In recent years, the progress of medical care has increased the longevity much. Hence, the aged people hold a growing proportion of total population in developed countries. Besides, people in Taiwan have more spare time because the authority regulates workers in Taiwan own two holidays per week. And under such trend, people put sports recreation and health care at a premium. Among a lot of sports that aged people engage in, Tai Chi Chuan is considered to benefit our health. At this moment, over 100 countries have established Tai Chi Chuan associations and some activities of them call more than 10 thousand people to participate in. However, most of present researches just focus on the advantages that Tai Chi Chuan do for physical and mental functions. But there is still in lack of research about their participative motives. Hence, this research is making efforts to find out the primary motives that influence the silver-haired people to participate in Tai Chi Chuan, and then separate the aged people into different groups by their motives. And the promoters will be able to work out their marketing strategy toward these aged participants. About the research methods, this research adopts in-depth interview first. By abundant experience of Tai Chi Chuan masters, the participative motives of their students and the features of Tai Chi Chuan are found out. Later, through a focus group interview, the motives of Tai Chi Chuan participants are also discussed. Then, these found motives are used to make the questionnaire. Because of lack of member book of the participants the questionnaires are distributed on a convenient basis. In the research, 380 questionnaires are distributed to silver-haired participants who are over 50 years old. 280 questionnaires are received and the valid samples attain to 259. After factor analysis, five factors are extracted, including ¡§Extrinsic behavior and identity¡¨, ¡§Improving physical and mental health¡¨, ¡§Pursuit of Tai Chi Chuan philosophy and skills¡¨, ¡§Recreation, escape from pressure, and making friends¡¨, ¡§Longevity and soul inspiration¡¨, and ¡§Body shaping¡¨. And then according to cluster analysis, three groups are separated on the basis of the five factors. Each of them is named ¡§Pursuit of extrinsic identity¡¨, ¡§Pursuit of soul inspiration and mental health¡¨, and ¡§Pursuit of balanced physical and mental health¡¨. Finally, by Chi-square test and ANOVA analysis, this research discovers that the average years of practice is significant related to ¡§Extrinsic behavior and identity¡¨, ¡§Improving physical and mental health¡¨, ¡§Longevity and soul inspiration¡¨. Therefore, promoters can find the needs of the silver-haired Tai Chi Chuan participants by these chief motives and design unique activities for each segment to make their promotion more effective.

This study presents thin film transistor (TFT) electrode structures in flat panel displays by imprint and electroless silver plating techniques. Imprint technique is not limited to the physical properties of optical lithography. In the imprinting process, the glass mold designed for imprinting process is fabricated by semiconductor manufacturing technology to imprint photoresist (AZ-650). The material is evaluated for imprint process. In addition, at present, electrode materials used in TFT process are aluminum (Al), chromium (Cr) and so on. In other research, the thin film plating technique adopts sputtering process to manufacture TFT electrode structures. This study uses electroless silver plating process to fabricate TFT electrode structures. The experimental result shows that the silver film can be deposited on the glass wafer by electroless plating, The mechanical properties of the silver films such as hardness, coefficient of elasticity and Young¡¦s module are measured by nanoindentation system,compared with the bulk materials.

¡@Complex nano-architectures of different materials have very interesting geometry. Combining different metallic nanoparticles should allow the manufacture of novel nanocomposite materials with a plethora of exploitable electronic, optical, and magnetic properties. ¡@Thiolate-capped Au nanoparticles prepared by Brust-Schiffrin two phase method and carboxylate-capped Ag nanoparticles prepared by our one-step synthetic method are reported. ¡@We also developed and prepared Ag colloidal solution which can be used to form a high valuable conductive thin film by spin coating on Si wafer. Specific resistivity of 6.097 £g£[¡Ecm for the silver metallic film (0.7 £gm) on the Si wafer can be simply produced by thermal annealing of Ag MPCs film under an atmosphere of 10 % H2-90 % N2 at 300 ¢J for 1 h. Furthermore, it can be applied to make a micro-circuit by ink-jet printing technique. ¡@The characterizations of TEM, PXRD, UV-Visible, NMR, FT-IR, ESCA, TGA, TA-MS, EI-MS and SEM of Au and Ag nanoparticles are described. ¡@We hope the thiolate-capped Au nanoparticles and carboxylate-capped Ag nanoparticles could spontaneously self-connect to form the nanoscale alloy superlattice structure by the molecular recognizable bifuctional linkage.

The object of the present research is to design and fabricate metal-dielectric thin film multilayer structures that make use of the nonlinear optical (NLO) response of Ag for efficient nonlinear absorption for sensor protection. These structures employ structural resonances to overcome the challenges of reflection and absorption that limit access to this large NLO response. The research consists of three parts: first, we present a comprehensive analysis of the contributions to the nonlinear optical response of Ag. Second, we present a systematic investigation of the linear optical properties of Metal-Dielectric Photonic Band-Gap (MDPBG) structures, including optimization of the structure for a particular transmittance spectrum. Third, we study the linear and nonlinear optical properties of Induced Transmission Filters (ITFs). Each of these parts includes experimental results backed by modeling and simulation.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-179).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-307).

Thesis (Professional Degree)--University of Missouri, School of Mines and Metallurgy, 1922. / The entire thesis text is included in file. Typescript. Illustrated by author. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed February 23, 2010)

This thesis presents spectroscopic studies of metallic nanoparticle localized surface plasmons and plasmon enhanced fluorescence. We investigated the dielectric sensitivity of silver nanoprisms to an external electric field and gold nanorods to the formation of a self-assembled surface monolayer. Dark field microscopy was used to image plasmonic scattering from single nanoparticles, and a liquid crystal tunable filter was used to construct corresponding spectra. The plasmon resonances of silver nanoprisms displayed both reversible red shifts and irreversible blue shifts along with drastic intensity changes upon exposure to an applied bias. The plasmon resonances of gold nanorods showed sensitivity to the presence of alkanethiol molecules adhered to the particle surface by a moderate red shift. An increase in the effective external dielectric caused a shift toward longer wavelengths. We imaged plasmon enhanced fluorescence in order to optimize experimental parameters for a developing project that can characterize nanoparticle structure on sub-wavelength dimensions. Preliminary controls were performed to account for the effect of O₂ plasma treatment, solvent and alkanethiol monolayer formation on surface plasmon resonances. We found that O₂ plasma treatment for different time intervals did not result in a plasmon shift compared to untreated nanoparticles exposed to N₂; however when exposed to solvent the surface plasmons of the treated particles shifted five times as far toward the red. Interestingly, the solvent effect only resulted in a plasmon shift when the particles were N₂ dried after solvent incubation. Gold nanorods incubated in ethanol showed no wavelength maximum shift in pure solvent over time, but shifted moderately to the red after incubation in a solution of alkanethiol molecules. Conditions for the plasmon enhanced fluorescence study were optimized using a dye conjugate of the same alkanethiol molecule used previously by formation from solution in a monolayer on the gold nanorod surface. The appropriate synthesis for dye functionalization, molecular concentrations, solvents and optical settings were determined. / text

Discovery of cisplatin as an effective anticancer agent has stimulated the development of metal based medicine. The recent advances in research on platinum, ruthenium and gold complexes have received much attention in medicinal chemistry, and studies of other less explored metal complexes may reveal alternative mode of mechanism as novel therapeutic agents. A series of dirhodium(II,II) complexes with carboxylate and carboxamidate ligands and thiourea complexes of coinage metals have been prepared in this study. Their biological activities and mechanisms of action have been studied. Dirhodium(II,II) carboxylate complexes with variations of alkyl and benzoyl side chains were synthesized and displayed remarkable cytotoxicities to cancer cells with potency down to submicromolar level. The cytotoxicities of rhodium complexes were found to significantly correlate with the cellular uptake of the rhodium complexes. As revealed by oligonucleotide microarray and bioinformatic analysis, the mode of action of the rhodium carboxylate complexes are highly similar to that of a proteasome inhibitor. Further cellular and biochemical studies showed that rhodium carboxylate complexes induced an accumulation of ubiquitinated proteins, inhibited the proteolytic activities of purified 20S proteasome and proteasomal deubiquitinating enzyme. These results corroborate that the impairment of the ubiquitin-proteasome system is linked to the cytotoxic action of rhodium carboxylate complexes. Silver is known to be an anti-inflammatory agent for topical treatment. A silver complex of N, N’-disubstituted cyclic thiourea that is reasonably stable towards reduced glutathionewas found to potently inhibit the NF-B transcriptional activity. Treatment of cells with silver thiourea inhibited TNF-α-stimulated IκB kinase activity, IκBα phosphorylation and degradation, nuclear translocation of NF-κB p65 and eventually the stimulated gene expression of inflammatory cytokines. Suppression of IκB kinase activity was associated with modification of sensitive cysteine residues and disruption of IκB kinase assembly. These data demonstrated that the inhibitory properties of Ag+ ions on an anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer drug target could be effectively delivered via the thiourea ligand. Silver is also an antimicrobial metal, and this study was also extended to understand the silver-bacteria interaction using a silver resistant bacteria as a model. Many silver resistant bacteria often produce considerable amount of silver particles when exposed to high concentrations of silver salts but the mechanism of biosynthesis is not well understood. A silver resistant E. coli that displays active silver efflux was shown to synthesize zero-valent silver nanoparticles in the periplasmic space through reduction of silver ions under anaerobic conditions. As the microbial c-type cytochromes are known to mediate respiratory metal reduction, their role in the biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles was examined. A deletion mutant of the cytoplasmic membrane-anchored tetra-heme c-type cytochrome subunit of periplasmic nitrate reductase (NapC) showed marked reduction of accumulation of silver nanoparticles. This study identified a molecular mechanism of biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles that may have implication in bioenvironmental processes and synthetic biology of metal nanomaterials. / published_or_final_version / Chemistry / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Murrell-Mottram empirical atomistic many-body and Gupta n-body potentials have been used to study various aspects of the cluster chemistry of copper, silver, gold and nickel. Simulated annealing techniques have been used to search for the global minima of the four metals with up to 55 atoms. Icosahedral, decahedral, octahedral, hexagonal closed packed and hexagonal prismatic structures were found. The gold clusters show some rearrangements and distortions from ideal geometries. Polyhedral cluster calculations up to 1 500 atoms predict that icosahedra and truncated octahedra are particularly stable. Calculations on the structures of copper-gold alloy clusters show that gold atoms prefer to occupy the surface of the cluster. A simple approximation to model the passivation of gold clusters by thiol ligands predicts that for 55 atoms the passivated cuboctahedron is more stable than the icosahedron, the reverse of the order for the bare clusters. Molecular dynamics simulations of gold adatoms on the gold (111) surface and of the impact of a 55 atom gold cluster with the gold (111) surface have been performed.