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Colloidal gold is a suspension (or colloid) of sub-micrometre-sized particles of gold in a fluid, usually water. The liquid is usually either an intense red colour (for particles less than 100 nm), or a dirty yellowish colour (for larger particles) ^[1] C ^[2]. The nanoparticles themselves can come in a variety of shapes: spheres, rods, cubes and caps are some of the more frequently observed ones.

Known since ancient times, it was originally used as a method of staining glass. Modern scientific evaluation of colloidal gold did not begin until Michael Faraday's ^[3] work of the 1850s. Currently, colloidal gold is a subject of substantial research, with applications in a wide variety of areas, including electronics and nanotechnology ^{[4] [5]} and the synthesis of novel materials with unique properties.

Contents 1 Synthesis 1.1 Turkevich et al. method 1.2 Brust et al. method 1.3 Sonolysis 2 History 3 Current research 4 References 5 See also

Generally, gold nanoparticles are produced in a liquid ("liquid chemical methods") by reduction of hydrogen tetrachloroaurate (HAuCl₄), although more advanced and precise methods do exist. After dissolving HAuCl₄, the solution is rapidly stirred while a reducing agent is added. This causes Au³⁺ ions to reduce to un-ionized gold atoms. As more and more of these gold atoms form, the solution becomes supersaturated, and gold gradually starts to precipitate in the form of sub-nanometer particles. The rest of the gold atoms that form stick to the existing particles, and, if the solution is stirred vigorously enough, the particles will be fairly uniform in size.

To prevent the particles from aggregating, some sort of stabilizing agent that sticks to the nanoparticle surface is usually added.They can be functionalized with various organic ligands to create organic-inorganic hybrids with advanced functionality. ^[6]

Pioneered by J. Turkevitch et al. in 1951 and refined by G. Frens in 1970s, this recipe is the simplest one available. Generally, it is used to produce modestly monodisperse spherical gold nanoparticles suspended in water of around 10–20 nm in diameter. Larger particles can be produced, but this comes at the cost of monodispersity and shape.

• Take 5.0×10⁻⁶ mol of HAuCl₄, dissolve it in 19 ml of deionized water (the result should be a faintly yellowish solution) .
• Heat it until it boils.
• Continue the heating, and while stirring vigorously, add 1 ml of 0.5% sodium citrate solution; keep stirring for the next 30 minutes.
• The colour of the solution will gradually change from faint yellowish to clear to grey to purple to deep purple, until settling on wine-red.
• Add water to the solution as necessary to bring the volume back up to 20 ml (to account for evaporation).

The sodium citrate first acts as a reducing agent, and later the negative citrate ions are adsorbed onto the gold nanoparticles and introduce the surface charge that repels the particles and prevents them from aggregating.

To produce larger particles, less sodium citrate should be added (possibly down to 0.05%, after which there simply would not be enough to reduce all the gold). The reduction in the amount of sodium citrate will reduce the amount of the citrate ions available for stabilizing the particles, and this will cause the small particles to aggregate into bigger ones (until the total surface area of all particles becomes small enough to be covered by the existing citrate ions).

This method was discovered by Brust and Schifrinn in early 1990s, and can be used to produce gold nanoparticles in organic liquids that are normally not miscible with water (like toluene).

• Dissolve 9.0×10⁻⁴ mol of HAuCl₄ (about 0.3051 g) in 30 ml of water.
• Dissolve 4.0×10⁻³ mol of tetraoctylammonium bromide (TOAB) (about 2.187 g) in 80 ml of toluene.
• Add the HAuCl₄ solution to the TOAB and stir vigorously for about 10– minutes. The colour of the aqueous phase should become clear, and the colour of the organic phase (the toluene) should become orange.
• While stirring vigorously, add (preferably dropwise, but really doesn't matter) sodium borohydride.(NaBH₄); the colour should change from orange to white to purple to eventually reddish, although the latter colours will be poorly discernible, since the solution will be quite concentrated and thus will look very dark.
• Keep stirring the solution for up to 24 hours to ensure monodispersity (especially if NaBH₄ was not added dropwise; otherwise just an hour or two is enough).
• Separate the organic phase, wash it once with dilute H₂SO₄ (sulfuric acid) to neutralize it, and several times with distilled water.

Here, the gold nanoparticles will be around 5–6 nm. NaBH₄ is the reducing agent, and TOAB is both the phase transfer catalyst and the stabilizing agent.

It is important to note that TOAB does not bind to the gold nanoparticles particularly strongly, so the solution will aggregate gradually over the course of two weeks or so, which can be very annoying. To prevent this, one can add a stronger binding agent, like a thiol (in particular, alkanethiols seem to be popular), which will bind to gold covalently, and hence pretty much permanently. The neat thing with alkanethiol protected gold nanoparticles is that one can precipitate them and then later resuspend them, which is in fact a superior purification mechanism than the last step in the process above.

Another method for the experimental generation of gold particles is by sonolysis. In one such process based on ultrasound irridiation of an aqueous solution of HAuCl₄ containing glucose ^[7] the reducing agents are hydroxyl radicals and sugar pyrolysis radicals (forming at the interfacial region between the collapsing cavities and the bulk water) and the morphology obtained is that of nanoribbons with width 30 -50 nm and length of several micrometers. These ribbons are very flexible and can bend with angles larger than 90°. When glucose is replaced by cyclodextrin (a glucose oligomer) only spherical gold particles are obtained suggesting that glucose is essential in directing the morphology towards a ribbon.

A so-called Elixir of Life, a potion made from gold, was discussed, if not actually manufactured, in ancient times. Colloidal gold has been used since Ancient Roman times to colour glass an intense shades of yellow, red, or mauve, depending on the concentration of gold. In the 16th century, the alchemist Paracelsus claimed to have created a potion called Aurum Potabile (Latin: potable gold). In the 17th century the glass-colouring process was refined by Andreus Cassius and Johann Kunchel. In 1842, John Herschel invented a photographic process called Chrysotype (from the Greek word for gold) that used colloidal gold to record images on paper. Paracelsus' work is known to have inspired Michael Faraday to prepare the first pure sample of colloidal gold, which he called 'activated gold', in 1857. He used phosphorus to reduce a solution of gold chloride. Faraday was the first to recognise that the colour was due to the minute size of the gold particles.

Research in 2005 demonstrated that nanogold-coated bacteria can be used for electronic wiring ^[8]. Bacillus cereus was deposited on a silicon / silicon dioxide wafer lined with gold electrodes. This device was covered with poly(L-lysine). The bacterium's surface has a negative charge, even more so due to the presence of flexible teichoic acid brushes. Poly(L-lysine)-coated nanogold particles carry a positive charge when washed with nitric acid and therefore the particles will only stick to the bacteria and nothing else. The bacteria survive this treatment. When the humidity increases in a sample, the bacterium absorbs water and the resulting membrane expansion can be monitored by measuring the electrical current flowing through the bacteria. The Fowler-Nordheim equation is obeyed when the interbacteria distance is very small. Some fascinating examples of gold nanoparticles having a strong activity have been recently highlighted by Vanga Reddy in a Spotlight article ^[9]a.

The reduction of hydrogen tetrachloroaurate by sodium borohydride in the presence of one of the enantiomers of penicillamine results in optical active colloidal gold particles ^[10]. Penicillamine anchors to the gold surface by virtue of the thiol group. In this study the particles are fractionated by electrophoresis into three fractions, Au₆, Au₅₀ and Au₁₅₀ as evidenced by Small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). The D and L isomers have a mirror image relationship in circular dichroism.

1. ↑  Bernhard Wessling, Conductive Polymer / Solvent Systems: Solutions or Dispersions?, 1996 (on-line here)
2. ↑  a) V. R. Reddy, "Gold Nanoparticles: Synthesis and Applications" 2006, 1791, and references therein; b) Michael Faraday, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, 1857
3. ↑  University of Edinburgh School of Physics: Colloids (mentions Elixir of Life)
4. ↑  Paul Mulvaney, University of Melbourne, The beauty and elegance of Nanocrystals, Use since Roman times
5. ↑  C. N. Ramachandra Rao, Giridhar U. Kulkarni, P. John Thomasa, Peter P. Edwards, Metal nanoparticles and their assemblies, Chem. Soc. Rev., 2000, 29, 27-35. (on-line here; mentions Cassius and Kunchel)
6. ↑  Sonochemical Formation of Single-Crystalline Gold Nanobelts Jianling Zhang, Jimin Du, Buxing Han, Zhimin Liu, Tao Jiang, Zhaofu Zhang Angewandte Chemie International Edition Volume 45, Issue 7 , Pages 1116 - 1119 2006 Abstract
7. ↑  Self-Assembly of Nanoparticles on Live Bacterium: An Avenue to Fabricate Electronic Devices Vikas Berry, Ravi F. Saraf Angewandte Chemie International Edition Volume 44, Issue 41 , Pages 6668 - 6673 2005 Abstract
8. ↑  Large Optical Activity of Gold Nanocluster Enantiomers Induced by a Pair of Optically Active Penicillamines Hiroshi Yao, Kanae Miki, Naoki Nishida, Akito Sasaki, and Keisaku Kimura J. Am. Chem. Soc.; 2005; 127(44) pp 15536 - 15543; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ja053504b Abstract

• Colloidal silver
• Nanovid microscopy