Understanding and exploiting ligand-driven nanoparticle interfacial phenomena

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

How nanoparticles (NPs) interact with their environment is a question that lies at the heart of many of our most promising potential nanotechnologies: from designing and predicting safe and effective use of NPs within living systems, to forming stretchable or self-healing films and composites, to assembling nanoparticles into superstructures for next generation solar cells, LEDs, and other applications. Nanoparticles present a complex interface through which they can interact with their environment, and this complexity arises from variety of possible NP core shapes and sizes which in turn define the available surface chemistry and the physical properties of the nanoparticle coating. Within the great variety of synthetically-available nanoparticle systems, thiol-capped gold nanoparticles are among the most thoroughly studied. Despite this fact, there remain many fundamental questions regarding how NPs behave in different environmental conditions (i.e. what makes a “good solvent” good? How can this influence how NPs interact with biological membranes?). Such questions are central to the counter-intuitive trends often observed in the physical properties (solubility and self-assembly) previously observed in these systems.***This research program will improve our understanding of the physical properties (mixing) of a model nanoparticle system consisting of spherical thiol-capped gold nanoparticles of various gold core sizes and thiol capping layer densities. We aim to achieve insights that can be applied to nanoparticles in general, and subsequently will be used to study more complex nanoparticle systems consisting of mixed capping layers consisting of two types of ligands (hydrophobic/philic) as well rod-shaped nanoparticles. By controlling interfacial parameters (temperature, solvation affinity to the oil or water phase), we will clarify some of the key nanoparticle properties in different environments and establish much needed guidelines for designing nanoparticles for a given application.