Three strategies to stabilise nearly monodispersed silver nanoparticles in aqueous solution

Amadeus Pz Stevenson,Duani Blanco Bea,Sonia Antoranz Contera,Sonia Trigueros,Alberto Iglesias Cerveto,Sergi Civit

doi:10.1186/1556-276x-7-151

Amadeus Pz Stevenson, Duani Blanco Bea + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/1556-276x-7-151

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Abstract

Silver nanoparticles are extensively used due to their chemical and physical properties and promising applications in areas such as medicine and electronics. Controlled synthesis of silver nanoparticles remains a major challenge due to the difficulty in producing long-term stable particles of the same size and shape in aqueous solution. To address this problem, we examine three strategies to stabilise aqueous solutions of 15 nm citrate-reduced silver nanoparticles using organic polymeric capping, bimetallic core-shell and bimetallic alloying. Our results show that these strategies drastically improve nanoparticle stability by distinct mechanisms. Additionally, we report a new role of polymer functionalisation in preventing further uncontrolled nanoparticle growth. For bimetallic nanoparticles, we attribute the presence of a higher valence metal on the surface of the nanoparticle as one of the key factors for improving their long-term stability. Stable silver-based nanoparticles, free of organic solvents, will have great potential for accelerating further environmental and nanotoxicity studies.PACS: 81.07.-b; 81.16.Be; 82.70.Dd.

Highlights

Metal nanoparticles have generated great interest for applications in physics, materials, chemistry and biomedical sciences in plasmonics [1], biosensing [2,3,4], nanomedicine [5,6,7], nanoelectronics [8], catalysis [9,10], magnetic fluids [11] and dye-based solar cells [12] due to their chemical, electronic, optical and magnetic properties
Silver nanoparticles functionalised with polyethylene glycol (PEG): organic stability The synthesised citrate-capped silver nanoparticles were characterised by UV-Vis spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) (Figure 1)
The observed substantial absorbance shift has been reported during photo-induced conversion of nanospheres to nanoplates [16,37], we found no evidence of nanoplates during both TEM and AFM characterisations

Summary

Introduction

Metal nanoparticles have generated great interest for applications in physics, materials, chemistry and biomedical sciences in plasmonics [1], biosensing [2,3,4], nanomedicine [5,6,7], nanoelectronics [8], catalysis [9,10], magnetic fluids [11] and dye-based solar cells [12] due to their chemical, electronic, optical and magnetic properties These applications depend on the availability of homogeneous nanoparticles of controlled size and shape, which remain stable in their complex target environments [13,14]. Synthesis via multiple steps, seed-mediated growth or via organic solvents has overcome several of these problems, these synthesis methods increase in complexity with the number of steps involved and will limit potential biomedical applications when organic solvents are used [25,26,27]

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