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Materials

Print And Serve Nanoparticles

Researchers synthesize and pattern gold nanoparticles by depositing reactive ingredients onto a silicon surface with an ink-jet printer

by Lauren K. Wolf
January 6, 2014 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 92, Issue 1

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Credit: Adapted from Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.
Reactive ink-jet printing overlays two molecular inks to create an array of spots filled with gold nanoparticles.
This schematic depicts reactive ink-jet printing, a process in which two molecular inks are printed on a surface to form spots filled with gold nanoparticles.
Credit: Adapted from Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.
Reactive ink-jet printing overlays two molecular inks to create an array of spots filled with gold nanoparticles.

To precisely position nanoparticles on the surfaces of arrayed devices such as electronic sensors and solar cells, some researchers use ink-jet printing. The nanoparticle ink typically has to be synthesized and purified in the lab first and then deposited by a printer. A research team led by Ghassan E. Jabbour of King Abdullah University of Science & Technology, in Saudi Arabia, has cut down this multistep process by printing the reactants needed to synthesize gold nanoparticles directly onto a silicon surface in the desired pattern (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201308429). The researchers begin their reactive ink-jet printing process by filling two print cartridges with chemical ingredients: One contains the reducing agent oleylamine plus a solvent, and the second contains gold(III) chloride trihydrate and a solvent. The team prints picoliter droplets from the first cartridge onto a silicon wafer and then prints droplets from the second cartridge directly on top of the first layer. After three hours in a 120 °C oven, the wafer contains an array of spots filled with gold nanoparticles of uniform diameter. According to Hua Zhang, a materials scientist at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, this technique not only uses less material compared with synthesizing nanoparticles via a traditional process, but it also “provides an on-demand facile integration of nanoparticles into various devices.”

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