Anisotropic metal nanoparticles : formation mechanisms and optical applications

Author(s)

Tulio Costa Rizuti da Rocha

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin
• Defense date: 2008-12-03

Examining board members

Daniela Zanchet; Aldo José Gorgatti Zarbin; Liane Marcia Rocha; Leandro Russovski Tessler; Richard Landers

• Advisor: José Antonio Brum; Daniela Zanchet

Abstract

Noble metal nanoparticles have attracted a recent renewed interest due to the new scientific and technological applications exploiting their unique optical properties. At nanometric scale, it is well known that the optical response of metals, related to the excitation of surface plasmons, strongly depends not only on the size of the particles but also on their shape. Several methodologies to produce silver and gold nanoparticles with different shapes are available in the literature. However, notwithstanding the efforts that have been made, the process that lead to the formation of anisotropic morphologies has not been fully understood yet and a general mechanism is still a challenge. In this work, we address the formation and growth mechanisms of silver triangular nanoprisms produced by photochemical methods. A set of characterization tools was used to study different aspects of the photochemical synthesis, namely, the morphological evolution, the reaction kinetics and the crystalline structure of the nanoprisms. The solid experimental evidences obtained here were used to build a phenomenological model that explains the formation and growth of silver triangular nanoplates in photochemical methods. This model was based on the influence of crystallographic defects, which induce the formation of the nanoprismas in the initial stages of the synthesis, and on the excitation of surface plasmons, which occurs in advanced stages and it is responsible for the definition of the final size of the nanoprismas. Additionally, theoretical calculations indicate that energetics might play an important role in this system, favoring the growth of nanoprismas relative to spheres. Finally, the silver triangular nanoprisms were used to study enhancement effects in the Raman scattering of molecules. We performed spectroscopic measurements for nanoplates with different sizes and the quantitative comparison of the curves indicated the existence of an optimum size that is dictated by surface plasmon energy losses (AU)