Dendritic Ag Nanostructures:Synthesis,Characterization and Application

Abstract

Silver has been at the forefront of material research and applications for many generations now. Decades long research to understand materials at macro, micro and nano level has brought us a huge knowledge about how size of materials affect their properties. Noble metals like Ag, Au and Pt have been historically classified as precious metals and were mostly used for jewellery, coinage etc. Later as we discovered their electrical and thermal properties, they started to be used as electrical contacts and other thermal and electrical conducting materials. Only recently we have been able to use them as nanoparticles in various ways. The present work focuses on synthesizing Silver nanoparticles using novel methodologies and non-energy intensive methods. This method employs a hybrid method using both seed and light mediated synthesis methods to grow interesting dendritic silver nanostructures. These nanostructures are believed to be growing over the PVP we have used in these experiments.Scientific community also defines these kind of nanostrucutres are plasmonic antennae since these structures can be used to concentrate the effect of light i.e. Surface plamon resonance at many specific locations of the structures. This enables these structures to be used for various plasmonic purposes including plasmon sensing and Surface Enhanced Raman and fluorescence sensing.