Kinetically controlled seed-mediated growth of narrow dispersed silver nanoparticles up to 120 nm: secondary nucleation, size focusing, and Ostwald ripening.

A facile synthesis method was developed based on the seed-mediated growth to get the narrow dispersed silver nanoparticles with controllable sizes ranging from 20 nm to larger than 120 nm. Environmentally friendly glucose acts as a reducing agent. Because of its weak reducing ability, the secondary nucleation is prevented in the seed-mediated growth, and the size of silver nanoparticles can be tuned continuously by the continuous addition of reactants. Controlling the supersaturation level is critical to suppress both the nucleation and Ostwald ripening, which can be realized by carefully controlling the addition rate of the reactants. We also set up a convenient method to determine the size and size-distribution of silver nanoparticles from the size-dependent absorption spectra of the colloids, and optimize the growth parameters using this method to get narrow dispersed silver nanoparticles.