Combinatorial Discovery of Cosolvent Systems for Production of Narrow Dispersion Thiolate-Protected Gold Nanoparticles

The effect of aqueous solvent concentration in the synthesis of water-soluble thiolate-protected gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) was investigated for 13 water-miscible solvents and three thiolate ligands (p-mercaptobenzoic acid, thiomalic acid, and glutathione). The results were analyzed by construction of heat maps that rank each reaction result for polydispersity. When solvents were organized in the heat map according to their Dimroth–Reichardt E T parameter (an approximate measure of polarity), two “hot spots” become apparent that are independent of the ligand used. We speculate that one hot spot may arise in part from the metal chelation or coordination ability of solvents that include diglyme, 1,2-dimethoxyethane, 1,4-dioxane, and tetrahydrofuran. The second hot spot arises at concentrations of alcohols including 2-propanol and 1-butanol that appear to selectively precipitate a growing product, presumably stopping its growth at a certain size. We observe some tightly dispersed products that appear novel. Overall, this study expands the number of tightly dispersed water-soluble AuNPs that can be directly synthesized.