Browsing by Subject "gold"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Dynamic relationship between precious metals
(2013) Sensoy, A.
We use a relatively new approach to endogenously detect the volatility shifts in the returns of four major precious metals (gold, silver, platinum and palladium) from 1999 to 2013. We reveal that the turbulent year of 2008 has no significant effect on volatility levels of gold and silver however causes an upward shift in the volatility levels of palladium and platinum. Using the consistent dynamic conditional correlations, we show that precious metals get strongly correlated with each other in the last decade which reduces the diversification benefits across them and indicates a convergence to a single asset class. We endogenously detect the shifts in these dynamic correlation levels and reveal uni-directional volatility shift contagions among precious metals. The results show that gold has a uni-directional volatility shift contagion effect on all other precious metals and silver has a similar effect on platinum and palladium. However, the latter two do not matter in terms of volatility shift contagion. Thus, investors that hedge with precious metals should, in particular, monitor the volatility levels of gold and silver. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
Open Access
Electrochemical synthesis of mesoporous gold films toward mesospace-stimulated optical properties
(Nature Publishing Group, 2015) Li C.; Dag Ö.; Dao, T.D.; Nagao, T.; Sakamoto, Y.; Kimura, T.; Terasaki O.; Yamauchi, Y.
Mesoporous gold (Au) films with tunable pores are expected to provide fascinating optical properties stimulated by the mesospaces, but they have not been realized yet because of the difficulty of controlling the Au crystal growth. Here, we report a reliable soft-templating method to fabricate mesoporous Au films using stable micelles of diblock copolymers, with electrochemical deposition advantageous for precise control of Au crystal growth. Strong field enhancement takes place around the center of the uniform mesopores as well as on the walls between the pores, leading to the enhanced light scattering as well as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), which is understandable, for example, from Babinet principles applied for the reverse system of nanoparticle ensembles. © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Influence of phase function on modeled optical response of nanoparticle-labeled epithelial tissues
(2011) Cihan, C.; Arifler, D.
Metal nanoparticles can be functionalized with biomolecules to selectively localize in precancerous tissues and can act as optical contrast enhancers for reflectance-based diagnosis of epithelial precancer. We carry out Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to analyze photon propagation through nanoparticle-labeled tissues and to reveal the importance of using a proper form of phase function for modeling purposes. We first employ modified phase functions generated with a weighting scheme that accounts for the relative scattering strengths of unlabeled tissue and nanoparticles. To present a comparative analysis, we repeat ourMCsimulations with simplified functions that only approximate the angular scattering properties of labeled tissues. The results obtained for common optical sensor geometries and biologically relevant labeling schemes indicate that the exact form of the phase function used as model input plays an important role in determining the reflectance response and approximating functions often prove inadequate in predicting the extent of contrast enhancement due to labeling. Detected reflectance intensities computed with different phase functions can differ up to ̃60% and such a significant deviation may even alter the perceived contrast profile. These results need to be taken into account when developing photon propagation models to assess the diagnostic potential of nanoparticle-enhanced optical measurements. © 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).