title: Spontaneous formation of dye-functionalized gold nanoparticles using reverse micellar systems.
abstract: Detailed exploratory and mechanistic investigations on spontaneous formation of dye-functionalized gold nanoparticles (GNPs) using dye-based reverse micellar systems are described in this publication. The accumulated results from spectroscopic and microscopic investigations demonstrated that water molecules confined within nanoscopic enclosure of the self-assembled reverse micelles played critical role in the redox processes of aurate ions to produce GNPs, which are assumed to have approximately constant size distributions. The resulting dye-functionalized GNPs were found to offer their absorption and fluorescence emission tunability by changing the medium polarity as well as to exhibit excellent film-forming properties to give optically homogeneous polystyrene thin films. These key findings in addition to broad applicability of the self-assembling process with a variety of dye analogues have led to a conclusion that the protocol presented here serves as a versatile synthetic method to provide a potential convenience for future development of new organic-inorganic hybrid nanomaterials.
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science, Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. tmtakah@ipc.shizuoka.ac.jp
authors.forename: Masaki
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Takahashi
authors.forename: Shuhei
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ohno
authors.forename: Norifumi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fujita
authors.forename: Tetsuya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sengoku
authors.forename: Hidemi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Yoda