Tag Archives: Gustav Mie

Beginner’s guide to gold nanoparticles in an Academic Minute

Catherine J Murphy, professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), contributed to Inside Higher Education’s Academic Minute audio podcast series according to an April 9, 2015 news item on the organization’s website.

Murphy provides a very good beginner’s description of gold nanoparticles.

Inside Higher Education offers a transcript of the ‘minute’ by Matthew on its Academic Minute website’s Catherine Murphy webpage,

Introduction: Atomic element #79 is the precious metal more commonly known as gold.

Transcript: Nanotechnology is the study of matter on the 1-100 nanometer scale – about ten to a thousand atoms across. Many elements in the periodic table are metals, and chemists like me are figuring out ways to create tiny metal nanoparticles of different shapes and sizes – spheres, cylinders, stars, you name it. We focus on gold. The cool thing is that each shape and size of gold nanoparticle absorbs and scatters light at different wavelengths, so each size and shape has a different color. So all the colors of the rainbow, and then some, are possible with gold nanoparticles.

The reasons for these neat colors go back to understanding the fundamental nature of light. We know from Maxwell’s equations that light is an electromagnetic wave. If light impinges on a “small conducting sphere,” then there are conditions under which certain wavelengths of light lead to huge oscillations in the electron cloud around the metal, for any metal in the periodic table, as a function of the size of the sphere, the dielectric constant of the metal, and the refractive index of the medium. These equations were worked out by Gustav Mie in the early 1900’s and give us a fundamental understanding of where these brilliant colors come from. In the last 30 years, scientists have adapted his equation for all kinds of shapes beyond spheres.

But gold nanoparticles are not just pretty to look at: they can do a lot of interesting things. For instance, these gold nanoparticles also scatter light, making them easy to find in a simple optical microscope; and since gold is environmentally benign compared to other metals, people are using gold nanoparticles to image biological systems. When you shine light on gold, the absorption of light is very strong at the right wavelengths. Once the particles have absorbed all this energy, what do they do with it? They dump it out as heat to the environment, and so can raise the temperature of their surroundings by many degrees. This is the basis for what scientists call “photothermal therapy,” the idea that if you could target gold nanoparticles to cancer cells, or pathogens, then you could shine light at the wavelength you desire and kill the cancer cells or pathogens. Finally, if you make gold nanoparticles really really small, like 10 atoms across, they no longer act like a noble, unreactive metal at all; they become very active catalysts, like the catalytic converter in your car. So chemists are also very interested in figuring out the transition between unreactive and reactive nanoparticles.

For anyone who might be interested in the series, the Academic Minute covers a wide variety of topics ranging from ‘addiction vaccines’ to ‘digital transgender archives’ to ‘aeroponic gardening’ to ‘a science of the voice’ to ‘Viking social standing’ and more. The series seems to have been started in January 2011 and they’ve been adding to the list of podcasts at a lively rate (lately, it’s one per day). There are over 200 pages of audio podcasts available for your listening pleasure.