Synthesis of stabilizer-free, homogeneous gold nanoparticles by cold atmospheric-pressure plasma jet and their optical sensing property

Recently, cold atmospheric-pressure plasma has been studied extensively as an efficient and green method to synthesize gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). Although the characteristics of the AuNPs, especially their homogeneousness, depend very much on the plasma synthesis parameters, there is a lack of a study involving these parameters systematically. Moreover, most of AuNPs-cold-plasma synthesis reports so far either required organic capping agents or resulted in highly non-uniform AuNPs. In this work, we systematically study the effect of most important synthesis parameters– including distance from the plasma jet to the solution, gas flow rate, plasma rate, volume and concentration of the precursor, plasma interaction time as well as the effect of the synthesis environment (humidity and temperature) – on the uniformity of the AuNPs. Through various characterization measurements, we show that homogeneous and highly stable intrinsic AuNPs with an average size of 45 nm can be obtained with optimized synthesis parameters and in the absence of a stabilizer. The synthesized AuNPs yield advanced optical sensing properties in comparison with commercial AuNPs and can be further applied in developing versatile and high-sensitivity biosensors.