DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Election/Restrictions
Applicant’s election without traverse of claims 1-9 in the reply filed on 2/27/26 is acknowledged.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC §103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1-4 and 6-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable over WO 2013/049409 A2 in view of Hoffman et al, “Controlled Formation of Gold Nanoparticle Dimers Using Multivalent Thiol Ligands,” Langmuir 2011, 27, 15165–15175, OR Aliganga et al., “Binary mixtures of self-assembled monolayers of 1,8-octanedithiol and 1-octanethiol for a controlled growth of gold nanoparticles,” Organic Electronics 7 (2006) 337–350.
Claims 1, 4 and 7: WO teaches mixing a gold colloid (HAuCl4 solution) with a block copolymer, spin coating it on a silicon substrate, and then removing the copolymer using plasma treatment as claimed – see the figures (fig. 1B showing synthetic steps copied herein), [0094]-[0107].
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Fig. 1B of WO 2013/049409 A2
WO does not teach further growing metal or gold nanoparticles using functionalization by thiol, etc., using thiol molecules for it,
Hoffman teaches in the introduction, “[m]etal nanoparticles have unique optical properties and are therefore used in many applications. Their optical response is dominated by electron oscillations in the nanoparticles which are known as surface plasmons.1 By the controlled interaction between metallic nanoparticles, it is possible to generate new properties which are distinctly different from those of the corresponding isolated nanoparticles.2 When two metal nanoparticles are placed in short distance from each other in a nanoparticle dimer, large electromagnetic field enhancements can occur at their junctions when the surface plasmons are excited.3,4 Such high-intensity hot spots are of special interest for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).3 The nearly exponential distance decay of interparticle plasmon coupling allows their application as plasmon rulers in biological systems.5,6 Metal nanoparticle dimers are further used in optical biosensing at the single nanostructure level.” Hoffman further teaches forming dimers of gold using thiol ligands.
Aliganga teaches in the abstract, “[t]he physical response of gold nanoparticles, e.g. electronic, magnetic, and photonic behaviors due to quantum confinement effects, does not only depend on their size, but also on the shape and the density of the nanoparticles and therefore on the probability for the formation of clusters of nanoparticles,” and in the introduction, “[o]ne of the technological challenges is to fabricate robust and organized assemblies of these nanoscale building blocks [7] where the collective structural properties and functions might be manipulated by the nature, size, cluster-size, position and overall composition of the nanoparticles e.g. on a substrate.” Alinganga teaches using thiols to functionalize and grow gold nanoparticles for controlled growth of gold nanoparticles.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill to use the teachings of Aliganga or Hoffman to further improve the electronic, magnetic and photonic behavior of gold nanoparticles in the nanostructure of WO.
Claim 2: Spin coating – [0159]
Claim 3: The nanostructure is functionalized – [0160]
Claim 8: drying – while WO is silent drying the product, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill to dry and keep the product dry after fabrication, especially for storage, shipping, and for use in electronics, plsamonics, etc..
Claims 6 and 9: forming a microfluidic chamber over the substrate is only making the device in a usable form, or housing it, and is not patentable because it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have the device properly enclosed in a usable form. WO teaches the nanstructure as being integrated into functional devices: [0105]. Such devices are, or would obviously have, housings. Microfluidic only refers to the size of the device, which is not patentable – see MPEP 2144.04.
Claim 5 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable as in rejection 1 and further in view of Hamley, "Nanostructure fabrication using block copolymers," Nanotechnology14 (2003) R39–R54 (Year: 2003) .
Claim 5 recites toluene as the solvent, which WO does not teach. Hamley teaches forming metal/gold nanostructure wherein toluene is used as the solvent for several different block copolymers, including the PS-PVP copolymer. Particularly, Hamley cites several different references wherein different copolymers were used for the process. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to use a suitable block copolymer and a solvent for that block copolymer chosen for the process. See MPEP 2143 for the rationales for combining the references.
Conclusion
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/KRISHNAN S MENON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 1777
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