Electrochemical analysis of single particles

Abstract

Nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted much more attention over the past two decades because of their various applications in both fundamental aspects and industrial applications. In this context, development of new techniques to detect and study single NP behavior is of significant importance because the function of NP is closely related to its size, morphology, surface charge density and chemical properties. Electrochemical techniques have made a great contribution to investigating on the single nanoparticle properties (e.g., surface charge, geometry, and surface chemistry) over the past ten years. This review focuses on the recent progress on single particles analysis with electrochemical techniques that are classified into three categories based on the detection principles, i.e., nanoparticle-microelectrode collision, resistive-pulse analysis and other electrochemical-based methods.