Research on Metal Nanoparticles

Dear Colleagues,

Nanoparticles offer a lot of advantageous backgrounds for many applications due to their physical, chemical, and biological properties. There are different compositions of nanoparticles—metals, lipids, polymers, peptides—as well as different shapes—spheres, rods, pyramids, flowers and so on—which are influenced by the synthesis methods and functionalization procedures. In the analytical fields the metal nanoparticles, particularly nanocarriers from precious (noble) metals are important due to their chemical stability and biocompatibility.

Colloidal metal nanoparticles are emerging as key materials for catalysis, plasmonics, sensing, and spectroscopy. Within these applications, control of the nanoparticle shape lends an increasing functionality and selectivity. Shape-controlled nanocrystals possess well-defined surfaces and morphologies because their nucleation and growth are controlled at the atomic level. In the Special issue of Metals, an overall picture of shaped metal particles will be presented, with a particular focus on solution-based syntheses for noble metals. General strategies for synthetic control of nanoparticles (NPs) will be discussed, emphasizing key factors that result in anisotropic, nonspherical growth, such as crystallographically selective adsorbates and seeding processes. Fine control over the physical, chemical, and structural properties of NPs is crucial to expand their applicability, especially in optoelectronics, e.g., in organic–inorganic hydride materials such as transistors or memory elements using such incredible effects as plasmon resonance, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), and another plasmonic phenomena important for nanomedicine, frequently called theranostic effects.

The incorporation of metallic NPs in polymeric semiconductors (such as poly(3-hexylthiophene) and poly(2-methoxy-5-(2ethl-hexyloxy)-1,4-phenylenevinlylene)) is one of the methods to modify their physical and chemical properties. It is already known that electrical conductance between two electrodes in the device depends on the charge stored or trapped on NPs [4,5,14]. The charge-trapping mechanism is affected by the NP size, and thus, the quality of NPs incorporated in these materials—their size monodispersity and shape uniformity—is crucial to their performance. Moreover, changes in field-effect mobility depend mainly on the NP size. Hence, to fully exploit the unique properties of NPs, it is extremely important to elaborate on the reproducible preparation methods of highly monodisperse NPs with defined and fully controlled shape and size, which will be the main focus of this Special Issue on “Metal Nanoparticles” of the journal Metals.

Prof. Eugeniusz M. Sheregiǐ
Guest Editor

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• colloidal noble metal nanoparticles
• plasmonic phenomena
• theranostic effects
• surface-enhanced Raman scattering
• plasmon resonance