Recently, researchers have managed to synthesize gold nanoparticles which show chiral behaviour, i.e. they exist in two shapes which are mirror images but which cannot be super-imposed [1]. The chirality was introduced by exposing Au seeds to a Au-deposition solution which contained one enantioner of a peptide, and this chiral peptide is said to block specific facets of the Au crystallite such that it grows in a spiral-like fashion. For SEM images of such particles we refer to the figure in the article listed below as ref. [1]. Such chiral particles are of interest for applications in optics and plasmonics, but possibly also for chiral molecular synthesis.
Assignment
The aim of the assignment is to investigate if the existing synthesis route for chiral Au nanoparticles, which is a multi-step batch process [2], can be transferred to a continuous flow process. This is thought to allow a better control over the quality of the particles in terms of size and shape uniformity, as well as allow an easier scale-up to larger production volumes of particles. The task of the student is to analyze how each individual process step, reported in literature, can be made continuous, to design and build a set-up to perform the continuous flow processs, and to test the quality of the resulting particles with electron microscroscopy (size and shape uniformity) and circular dichroism (optical chirality).
References
- Lee, H.-E.; Ahn, H.-Y.; Mun, J.; Lee, Y. Y.; Kim, M.; Cho, N. H.; Chang, K.; Kim, W. S.; Rho, J.; Nam, K. T. Amino-acid- and peptide-directed synthesis of chiral plasmonic gold nanoparticles. Nature 2018, 556, 360– 365, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0034-1
- Im, S.W., Kim, R.M., Han, J.H. et al. Synthesis of chiral gold helicoid nanoparticles using glutathione. Nature Protocols (2024), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41596-024-01083-y
Contact information
Han Gardeniers; E-mail: j.g.e.gardeniers (at) utwente.nl