Optical Properties and Sizes of Silver Nanoparticles in Micellar Solutions

Sizes of silver nanoparticles prepared by the reduction of silver ions in reverse micelles with solvated electron (radiation-chemical synthesis) and natural pigment quercetin (biochemical synthesis) were determined. The sizes were measured by the dynamic light-scattering technique. Histograms of the micelle size distributions were compared with the absorption spectra of the corresponding solutions of nanoparticles. It was shown that the employed synthesis procedures made it possible to obtain metal particles with the sizes of the order of several nanometers; the changes of optical density in the maximum of nanoparticle absorption band correlated with the changes of the particle content in solution. The results obtained were compared with the data available for silver nanoparticles prepared by the radiation-chemical synthesis in aqueous solution in the presence of stabilizer and by the chemical synthesis in reverse micelles with traditional reducing agents.