Plasmon Works

Speciate is an automated pipeline that turns a TEM micrograph of gold nanoparticles into the three numbers a nanoparticle lab needs on every batch: mean size, size distribution, and — the hard one — how aggregated the particles are in solution. Stage one segments every particle with a Segment-Anything foundation model (NP-SAM) plus a one-click human-QC reviewer, validated to within ±6% of hand-counting across eight of the Dragnea lab's (Indiana University) samples while measuring up to 6× more particles. Stage two feeds those sizes into a first-principles optical model (Mie → exact multipole T-matrix) that predicts the UV-Vis spectrum with zero fitted parameters; where the prediction breaks, that gap quantifies aggregation — a readout no existing UV-Vis tool provides. It replaces a half-day of manual TEM counting with a minutes-long, higher-throughput measurement. Two open-source, MIT-licensed repos with a clean data contract.

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