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Updated: Feb 14, 2026

Gold Nanoparticle Synthesis
Published on: July 10, 2021
A new route to gold nanoflowers
Ferenc Liebig1, Ricky Henning, Radwan M Sarhan
1Institute for Chemistry, University of Potsdam, 14476 Potsdam, Germany.
Abstract:
Catanionic vesicles spontaneously formed by mixing the anionic surfactant bis(2-ethylhexyl) sulfosuccinate sodium salt with the cationic surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide were used as a reducing medium to produce gold clusters, which are embedded and well-ordered into the template phase. The gold clusters can be used as seeds in the growth process that follows by adding ascorbic acid as a mild reducing component. When the ascorbic acid was added very slowly in an ice bath round-edged gold nanoflowers were produced. When the same experiments were performed at room temperature in the presence of Ag+ ions, sharp-edged nanoflowers could be synthesized. The mechanism of nanoparticle formation can be understood to be a non-diffusion-limited Ostwald ripening process of preordered gold nanoparticles embedded in catanionic vesicle fragments. Surface-enhanced Raman scattering experiments show an excellent enhancement factor of 1.7 · 105 for the nanoflowers deposited on a silicon wafer.
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