title: Label-free in situ optical monitoring of the adsorption of oppositely charged metal nanoparticles.
abstract: The mechanism of alternating deposition of oppositely charged gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) was investigated by optical waveguide lightmode spectroscopy (OWLS). OWLS allows monitoring of the kinetics of layer-by-layer (LbL) adsorption of positively and negatively charged nanoparticles in real time without using any labels so that the dynamics of layer formation can be revealed. Positively charged NPs that are already deposited on a negatively charged glass substrate strongly facilitate the adsorption of the negatively charged particles. The morphology of the adsorbed layer was also investigated with atomic force microscopy (AFM). AFM revealed that the interaction between oppositely charged particles results in the formation of NP clusters with sizes varying between 100 and 6000 NPs. The cluster size distribution is found to be an exponentially decaying function, and we propose a simple theory to explain this finding.
authors.affiliation: Doctoral School of Molecular- and Nanotechnology, University of Pannonia , H-8201 Veszprém, Hungary.
authors.forename: Beatrix
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Peter
authors.forename: Sandor
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kurunczi
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Patko
authors.forename: Istvan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Lagzi
authors.forename: Bartlomiej
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Kowalczyk
authors.forename: Zoltán
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Rácz
authors.forename: Bartosz A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Grzybowski
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Horvath
mesh_terms: D000327:Adsorption; D006046:Gold / Q000737:chemistry*; D053768:Metal Nanoparticles / Q000737:chemistry*; D010316:Particle Size; D013057:Spectrum Analysis; D013499:Surface Properties
chemical_list: D006046:Gold