The group's perspective on "Using Electrochemistry to Benchmark, Understand, and Develop Noble Metal Nanoparticle Syntheses," has been published in ACS Nanoscience Au.
Co-authors Gabe, Sebastian, and Hari highlight significant recent advances and promising future opportunities in the use of electroanalytical methods to advance understanding of colloidal nanoparticle synthesis, as well as in the use of electrodeposition to develop new syntheses for shaped metal nanoparticles:
- Open-circuit potential (OCP) measurements can meet an important longstanding need for an in situ analytical tool that can measure the real-time chemistry of nanoparticle growth.
- These relatively straightforward and accessible measurements can serve as benchmarks of the optimal chemistry of a successful reaction when reporting nanoparticle syntheses—something that is currently lacking in the field—to enhance synthetic reproducibility and streamline synthetic optimization.
- The increased parameter space and synthetic flexibility of electrodeposition can be used in combination with electrochemical measurements of growth to accelerate synthesis design and discovery, particularly for structure-composition combinations whose synthesis is presently prohibitive.
In addition, we provide a critical overview of the strengths and limitations of other methods for the time-resolved study of metal nanoparticle growth to highlight how OCP measurements can complement these approaches and fill gaps in mechanistic understanding.
We look forward to seeing how these tools might help the broader nanoparticle synthesis community, and to hopefully sharing additional developments in this area in the near future.