Kinetics of the X-ray induced gold nanoparticle synthesis.

Time resolved small angle scattering has been employed to follow the formation kinetics of gold nanoparticles from a solution of gold hydrochlorate and tris-sodium citrate at room temperature. While UV irradiation leads to a slow kinetics as observed by optical spectroscopy, the irradiation by the X-rays led to a reduction of the gold within a few minutes. The size and morphology evolution during the radiolytic formation of particles displays the initial nucleation phase and the growth kinetics, which exhibit very nonuniform behavior. They show that the electrostatics of the particle stabilization plays a pronounced role in the repulsive forces and transient clustering of particles.