Tag Archives: Dong Su

Producing catalytically active gold nanoparticles at absolute zero

A Sept. 8, 2016 news item on Nanowerk describes research into producing remarkably stable gold nanoparticles with catalytic capabilities (Note: A link has been removed),

An ultra-high-vacuum chamber with temperatures approaching absolute zero—the coldest anything can get—may be the last place you would expect to find gold. But a group of researchers from Stony Brook University (SBU) in collaboration with scientists at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have just demonstrated that such a desolate place is ideal for producing catalytically active gold nanoparticles.

A paper describing the first catalyst ever produced using their new method, called Helium Nanodroplet Deposition (HND), was recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (“Development of a New Generation of Stable, Tunable, and Catalytically Active Nanoparticles Produced by the Helium Nanodroplet Deposition Method”).

A Sept. 7, 2016 Brookhaven National Laboratory news release by Alexander Orlov and Karen McNulty Walsh, which originated the news item, describes the work in more detail,

As lead researcher Alexander Orlov of SBU explains, HND works by boiling gold atoms in a vacuum to produce a vapor. The vaporized gold is then “picked up” by an extremely cold jet stream of liquid helium droplets that act to literally strike gold clusters against a solid collector downstream. Upon striking the collector, the liquid helium droplets instantly evaporate releasing helium gas and leaving behind unprecedentedly pure and stable gold nanoparticles.

“This new method to produce active nanoparticles offers unique opportunities to create materials with unprecedented properties to solve energy and environmental problems,” Orlov said.  “Our Brookhaven and AFRL collaborators made it possible for our students to access the most unique facilities in the world, which made all the difference in our research.”

Qiyuan Wu, a graduate student working in Orlov’s laboratory and first author on the paper, performed much of the work to develop the method. Michael Lindsay and Claron Ridge of AFRL provided state-of-the-art facilities at Eglin Air Force Base, one of only a few places in the world with the capabilities required to generate the gold nanoparticles using the new technique. And a team at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab, used advanced imaging and characterization tools to study the nanoparticles’ catalytic activity.

Specifically, Brookhaven scientists Eric Stach and Dmitri Zakharov of the CFN and Shen Zhao, then a postdoctoral fellow working under Stach, developed a method to deposit the gold nanoparticles onto a “catalyst support” structure they use for characterizing the stability of other nanomaterials. They then studied the characteristics of the nanoparticles, including their stability under reaction conditions, using the Titan Environmental Transmission Electron Microscope at the CFN. Further characterization by Zhao and CFN staff member Dong Su using aberration-corrected Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy allowed the SBU researchers to understand how the droplets form.

“This was part of a User project, that morphed into a collaboration,” said Stach, who leads the electron microscopy group at CFN. “It was a very nice study”—and an example of how the Office of Science User Facilities offer not just unique scientific equipment but also scientific expertise that can be essential to the success of a research project.

Nanoparticles are of high research interest due to their improved properties compared to bulk materials. They have revolutionized technologies aimed at improving sustainability such as fuel cells, photocatalysts, and solar panels. The gold nanoparticle catalysts produced in this study are capable of converting poisonous carbon monoxide gas into carbon dioxide gas, an essential reaction that occurs in the catalytic converters of cars to reduce pollution and lower impacts on the environment.

According to Orlov, the HND method is not limited to the production of gold nanoparticles, but can be applied to nearly all metals and can even produce challenging multi-metallic nanoparticles. The technique’s versatility and ability to produce clean and well-defined samples make it a powerful tool for the discovery of new catalysts and studying factors that affect catalyst performance.

The collaboration is currently researching how the parameters of HND can be adjusted to control catalyst performance.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Development of a New Generation of Stable, Tunable, and Catalytically Active Nanoparticles Produced by the Helium Nanodroplet Deposition Method by Qiyuan Wu, Claron J. Ridge, Shen Zhao, Dmitri Zakharov, Jiajie Cen, Xiao Tong, Eoghan Connors, Dong Su, Eric A. Stach, C. Michael Lindsay, and Alexander Orlov. J. Phys. Chem. Lett., 2016, 7 (15), pp 2910–2914 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b01305 Publication Date (Web): July 13, 2016

Copyright © 2016 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

Using light to make gold crystal nanoparticles

Gold crystal nanoparticles? Courtesy: University of Florida

Gold crystal nanoparticles? Courtesy: University of Florida

A team from the University of Florida has used gold instead of silver in a process known as plasmon-driven synthesis. From a July 8, 2016 news item on phys.org,

A team of University of Florida researchers has figured out how gold can be used in crystals grown by light to create nanoparticles, a discovery that has major implications for industry and cancer treatment and could improve the function of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and solar panels.

A July 6, 2016 University of Florida news release, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

Nanoparticles can be “grown” in crystal formations with special use of light, in a process called plasmon-driven synthesis. However, scientists have had limited control unless they used silver, but silver limits the uses for medical technology. The team is the first to successfully use gold, which works well within the human body, with this process.

“How does light actually play a role in the synthesis? [This knowledge] was not well developed,” said David Wei, an associate professor of chemistry who led the research team. “Gold was the model system to demonstrate this.”

Gold is highly desired for nanotechnology because it is malleable, does not react with oxygen and conducts heat well. Those properties make gold an ideal material for nanoparticles, especially those that will be placed in the body.

When polyvinylpyrrolidone, or PVP, a substance commonly found in pharmaceutical tablets, is used in the plasmon-driven synthesis, it enables scientists to better control the growth of crystals. In Wei’s research, PVP surprised the team by showing its potential to relay light-generated “hot” electrons to a gold surface to grow the crystals.

The research describes the first plasmonic synthesis strategy that can make high-yield gold nanoprisms. Even more exciting, the team has demonstrated that visible-range and low-power light can be used in the synthesis. Combined with nanoparticles being used in solar photovoltaic devices, this method can even harness solar energy for chemical synthesis, to make nanomaterials or for general applications in chemistry.

Wei has spent the last decade working in nanotechnology. He is intrigued by its applications in photochemistry and biomedicine, especially in targeted drug delivery and photothermal therapeutics, which is crucial to cancer treatment. His team includes collaborators from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he has worked as a visiting scholar, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition, the project has provided an educational opportunity for chemistry students: one high school student (through UF’s Student Science Training Program), two University scholars who also [sic] funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, five graduate students and two postdocs.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Polyvinylpyrrolidone-induced anisotropic growth of gold nanoprisms in plasmon-driven synthesis by Yueming Zhai, Joseph S. DuChene, Yi-Chung Wang, Jingjing Qiu, Aaron C. Johnston-Peck, Bo You, Wenxiao Guo, Benedetto DiCiaccio, Kun Qian, Evan W. Zhao, Frances Ooi, Dehong Hu, Dong Su, Eric A. Stach, Zihua Zhu, & Wei David Wei. Nature Materials (2016) doi:10.1038/nmat4683 Published online 04 July 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

Distinguishing between left-handed and right-handed molecules with nanocubes

Learning to distinguish your left from your right isn’t all that easy for children. It’s also remarkably easy to lose the ability (temporarily) to make that distinction if you start experimenting with certain kinds of brain repatterning. However, the distinctions are important not only in daily life but in biology too according to a June 26, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

In chemical reactions, left and right can make a big difference. A “left-handed” molecule of a particular chemical composition could be an effective drug, while its mirror-image “right-handed” counterpart could be completely inactive. That’s because, in biology, “left” and “right” molecular designs are crucial: Living organisms are made only from left-handed amino acids. So telling the two apart is important—but difficult.

Now, a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Ohio University has developed a new, simpler way to discern molecular handedness, known as chirality.

The June 26, 2013 Brookhaven National Laboratory news release, which originated the news item, describes the new technique for distinguishing left- from right-handed molecules,

They used gold-and-silver cubic nanoparticles to amplify the difference in left- and right-handed molecules’ response to a particular kind of light. The study, described in the journal NanoLetters, provides the basis for a new way to probe the effects of handedness in molecular interactions with unprecedented sensitivity.

The scientists knew that left- and right-handed chiral molecules would interact differently with “circularly polarized” light—where the direction of the electrical field rotates around the axis of the beam. This idea is similar to the way polarized sunglasses filter out reflected glare unlike ordinary lenses.

Other scientists have detected this difference, called “circular dichroism,” in organic molecules’ spectroscopic “fingerprints”—detailed maps of the wavelengths of light absorbed or reflected by the sample. But for most chiral biomolecules and many organic molecules, this “CD” signal is in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the signal is often weak. The tests thus require significant amounts of material at impractically high concentrations.

The team was encouraged they might find a way to enhance the signal by recent experiments showing that coupling certain molecules with metallic nanoparticles could greatly increase their response to light. Theoretical work even suggested that these so-called plasmonic particles—which induce a collective oscillation of the material’s conductive electrons, leading to stronger absorption of a particular wavelength—could bump the signal into the visible light portion of the spectroscopic fingerprint, where it would be easier to measure.

The group experimented with different shapes and compositions of nanoparticles, and found that cubes with a gold center surrounded by a silver shell are not only able to show a chiral optical signal in the near-visible range, but even more striking, were effective signal amplifiers. For their test biomolecule, they used synthetic strands of DNA—a molecule they were familiar with using as “glue” for sticking nanoparticles together.

When DNA was attached to the silver-coated nanocubes, the signal was approximately 100 times stronger than it was for free DNA in the solution. That is, the cubic nanoparticles allowed the scientists to detect the optical signal from the chiral molecules (making them “visible”) at 100 times lower concentrations.

The observed amplification of the circular dichroism signal is a consequence of the interaction between the plasmonic particles and the “exciton,” or energy absorbing, electrons within the DNA-nanocube complex, the scientists explained.

“This research could serve as a promising platform for ultrasensitive sensing of chiral molecules and their transformations in synthetic, biomedical, and pharmaceutical applications,” Lu [Fang Lu, the first author on the paper] said.

“In addition,” said Gang [Oleg Gang, a researcher at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials and lead author on the paper], “our approach offers a way to fabricate, via self-assembly, discrete plasmonic nano-objects with a chiral optical response from structurally non-chiral nano-components. These chiral plasmonic objects could greatly enhance the design of metamaterials and nano-optics for applications in energy harvesting and optical telecommunications.”

I last mentioned chirality in the context of work being done with controlling the chirality of carbon nanotubes at Finland’s Aalto University in an April 30 , 2013 posting.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper published by the Brookhaven National Laboratory and Ohio University,

Discrete Nanocubes as Plasmonic Reporters of Molecular Chirality by Fang Lu, Ye Tian, Mingzhao Liu, Dong Su, Hui Zhang, Alexander O. Govorov, and Oleg Gang. Nano Lett., Article ASAP
DOI: 10.1021/nl401107g Publication Date (Web): June 18, 2013
Copyright © 2013 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.