Growing Anisotropic Plasmonic Nanoparticles for Biosensing Applications

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has shown the importance of cheap and reliable biosensors for virus detection. Anisotropic magneto-plasmonic nanoparticles(NPs) have unique optical properties and superparamagnetic behavior, promising for this application. Over the last two decades, the seed-mediated growth synthesis has proven to be a powerful synthetic route to grow anisotropic gold(Au) NPs, of an extensive range of shapes and sizes. The synthesis uses the small CTAB coated Au seed produced by rapid nucleation with sodium borohydride(NaBH4). To our knowledge, silver-assisted seed-mediated growth has not yet successfully been adopted to synthesize magneto-plasmonic NPs. Citrate-coated coprecipitation iron-oxide(IO) NPs could be a good candidate as seeds for the reaction route. The IONPs are much larger , have a slightly different crystal lattice structure, and are coated with citrate instead of CTAB. Our group has previously demonstrated that it is possible to use citrate-coated gold seeds to grow anisotropic Au NPs. In this project, the role of the size and crystal structure of the seed will be studied. - As a first step into utilizing the silver-assisted seed-mediated growth to grow anisotropic magneto-plasmonic nanoparticles suited for biosensing applications.