engleski

Controlling silver nanoparticle production by ion - reduction process for tailoring of plasmonic properties

For the last few decades, scientists have been focused on the production of metal nanoparticles due to their electronic, optical, magnetic and other specific properties. The potential application of metal nanoparticles is indeed broad ; they have already been used in catalysis, photonics, optoelectronics, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), anticancer therapy, drug delivery, cell labeling, non-invasive diagnostics (bioimaging and NMR imaging), etc. Silver nanoparticles are of particular importance because of their physical and chemical properties, which can be broadly tailored by controlling their size and morphology. Although a wide variety of silver nanoparticle synthesis methods have been published, one of them is especially important because it allows us to tailor the process to obtain nanoparticles of the desired shape and/or size –the chemical reduction of silver precursor in a solution, usually in the presence of a stabilizing agent. Because of a delicate interplay of kinetics and thermodynamics, it is quite difficult to control both size and shape simultaneously, but with the choice of silver precursor, reducing agent, solvent, stabilizing agent, reaction temperature, reaction time, molar ratio of precursor/ solvent, molar ratio of nucleating agent/metallic silver, weight ratio of stabilizing agent/silver precursor [5], the precursor injection rate [1] as well as the precursor/ reducing agent/ stabilizing agent/ adding sequence it is possible to synthesize specifically–shaped silver nanoparticles with a relatively narrow size distribution [6]. Still, the production of nanoparticles should be simple, reproducible and relatively cheap, which is sometimes hard to achieve. Here, the silver nanoparticle production by the reduction of silver ions is presented. The influence of temperature, solvent selection, precursor injection rate and reactants adding sequence on the morphology and size of silver nanoparticles is investigated. The reproducibility of the process under the same experimental conditions has also been examined. The synthesized nanoparticles have been characterized by scanning electron microscopy and UV-Vis spectrometry. The experimentally determined plasmonic properties of nanoparticles are compared with the theoretical prediction of electrodynamic simulations. Some of the ongoing results will be presented at this conference.

silver nanoparticles ; sol-gel synthesis

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