HST makes a variety of products for development partners and commercial customers ranging from the Department of Homeland Security, security companies interested in anti-counterfeit signatures, high throughput screeners, energy producers to oncologists.  Reflecting the similarities of the problems, the sophisticated instruments/skills needed to characterize advanced materials for protection against terrorists and cancer are common.

Across markets, we have found that the shared requirement
of users of our hybrid silica materials is precision.  It is not surprising because nanoscale materials offer unusual and sometimes unpredictable properties as a consequence of their size; these properties often vary greatly as a function of size.  The commercial corollary to this scientific observation is that tiny variations in size or other nanoscale features (coating, charge) can have a significant negative impact on
product performance.

Since inception, HST has refined several synthetic approaches and built a testbed to characterize the materials made in our laboratory – this critical capability allows us to measure the precision of their size and resulting properties. By incorporating fluorescent materials in nanoparticles, we can measure their sizes with precision below 10 nm, below the limits of resolution of conventional dynamic light scattering instruments.