Abstract Gold parting enabled the production of very pure gold for various purposes from sixth century BC onwards, but analytical proof this pyrotechnical process is difficult. We describe a new approach identification purified combining silver and copper isotopic with trace element analyses. Parting experiments were performed gold-silver-copper alloys using classical salt cementation to invest...

Monolayer-protected Au, Ag, and Au:Ag alloy nanoclusters have been synthesized using octanethiol and octadecanethiol as capping agents. The particle-size distribution is narrow with an average core size of 3–4 nm. Optical nonlinearity induced by 35 ps pulses at 532 nm has been investigated in these samples using the Z-scan technique. It is found that in general, they behave either as saturable ...

Bimetallic gold-silver core-shell nanoparticles were prepared by chemical reduction in aqueous solution, following a method that was friendly to the environment, allowing us to use this for medicinal purposes. Gold nanoparticles were synthesized, and silver cations were then reduced on the nanoparticles. Using the optical properties of metallic nanoparticles, surface plasmon resonance was deter...

Recent advances in chemical synthesis have made it possible to produce gold and silver nanowires that are free of large-scale crystalline defects and surface roughness. Surface plasmons can propagate along the wires, allowing them to serve as optical waveguides with cross sections much smaller than the optical wavelength. Gold nanowires provide improved chemical stability as compared to silver ...

We report the chemistry and photophysics of atomic gold and silver particles in inorganic glasses. By synchrotron irradiation of gold-doped soda-lime silicate glasses we could create and identify unambiguously the gold dimer as a stable and bright luminescing particle embedded in the glassy matrix. The gold dimer spectra coincide perfectly with rare gas matrix spectra of Au(2). The glass matrix...

Silver nucleation on gold has been exploited for signal amplification and has found application in several qualitative and quantitative bio-sensing techniques, thanks to the simplicity of the method and the high sensitivity achieved. Very recently, this technique has been tentatively applied to improve the performance of gold-based immunoassays. In this work, the exploitation of the signal ampl...

"Catching" metals in the nonmetallic form in solution, as they grow to bulk, is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary materials research. A new kind of stabilization to catch the nonmetallic form of noble metals with small thiols has evolved as an exciting area of synthesis during the past decade. Gold clusters stay in the frontline of this research, yielding new "molecules" composed o...

We combine the fabrication of Au and Au/Ag core/shell nanorods (NRs), as well as experimental measurements of vis-NIR extinction, unpolarized, and cross-polarized light scattering spectra, with T-matrix and separation-of-variables simulations, to gain insight into the relation between the morphology/composition of nanoparticles and their isotropic and anisotropic optical responses. Using severa...