A General Phase Transfer Approach for Metal Ions and Nanoparticles

Abstract This chapter introduces a general protocol to transfer metal ions from aqueous solution to an organic medium, which involves mixing the aqueous solution of metal ions with an ethanolic solution of dodecylamine (DDA), and extracting the coordinating compounds formed between metal ions and DDA into toluene. This protocol could be applied toward transferring a wide variety of transition metal ions with efficiency higher than 95 % and allows the synthesis of a variety of metallic and semiconductor nanocrystals to be performed in organic medium using relatively inexpensive water-soluble metal salts as starting materials. This protocol could also be extended to transfer a variety of noble metal nanoparticles from aqueous phase to nonpolar organic media. As shown in latter sections, the phase transfer of metal ions and nanoparticles offers necessary solvent surroundings for the wet chemistry-based synthesis of nanomaterials and is an important step preceding the fabrication of noble metal-based nanocomposites with multiple functionalities.