IEEE-4065599 (pdf) Comments on Microelectrodes
- The amplifiers themselves, even back in 1950's, posed no problems -- low bandwidth. All that is required is low noise and high input impedance.
- KCl Glass electrodes are LPF (10M resistive + 10pf parasitic capacitance); metal HPF (capacitive).
- The fluid tip will not see external triphasic spikes of vertebrate axons above the noise level.
- Metal probe the most useful.
- Pt electrode in CSF behaves like a capacitor at low voltage across a broad frequency range. CSF has compounds that retard oxidation; impedance is more resistive with physiological saline.
- Noise voltage generated by a metal electrode best specified by equivalent noise resistance at room temperature, R_n should equal the real part of the electrode impedance at the same frequency.
- Much of electrochemistry: solid AgCl diffuses away from an electrode tip with great speed and can hardly be continuously formed with an imposed current. Silver forms extremely stable complexes with organic molecules having attached amino and sulfhydril groups which occur in plenty where the electrode damages the tissue. Finally, the reduction-oxidation potential of axoplasm is low enough to reduce methylene blue, which places it below hydrogen. AgCl and HgCl are reduced.
- The external current of nerve fibers is the second derivative of the traveling spike, the familiar triphasic (??) transient.
- Svaetichin [1] and Dowben and Rose [3] plated with Platinum black. This increases the surface area.
- Very quickly it burns onto itself a shell of very adherent stuff. It is kept from intimate contact with the tissue around it by a shell.
- We found that if we add gelatin to the chloroplatinic acid bath from which we plate the Pt, the ball is not only made adherent to the tip but is, in a sense, prepoisoned and does not burn a shell into itself.
- glass insulation using woods metal (which melts at a very low temperature). Platinum ball was plated onto 2-3um pipette tip. 3um gelatinized platinum black ball, impedance 100kOhm at 1kHz.
- Highly capacitive probe: can be biased to 1 volt by a polarizing current of 1e-10 amp. (0.1nA).
- Getting KCl solution into 1um pipettes is quite hard! They advise vacuum boiling to remove the air bubbles.
- Humble authors, informative paper.
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