How nanoparticles nucleate, grow and ripen

Six ways the sizes of nanoparticles are set, drawn as particles and arrows: burst nucleation and diffusion-controlled growth, seeds that form first in the Turkevich synthesis and then grow, Ostwald ripening, oriented attachment, digestive ripening and size-selective precipitation afterwards. Each caption quotes the cited papers.

1. Burst nucleation: In the classical picture, burst nucleation and diffusion-controlled growth are the most important factors for controlling the size distribution (Kwon & Hyeon 2011); a rapid hot injection gives a sharp nucleation event that promotes a narrow size distribution (Manthiram 2013). 2. Seeds first, then growth: In the Turkevich synthesis seeds of about 3 nm form early (Bilal 2025); they form in the first phase and the remaining gold is distributed onto them, no further particles forming later, so the number of seeds sets the final size (Wuithschick 2015). 3. Ostwald ripening: Diffusion-controlled growth in which larger particles grow at the expense of smaller ones (Zhang 2010). 4. Oriented attachment: Iron oxyhydroxide particles turned until their lattices matched, jumped to contact over less than 1 nm, then filled the neck atom by atom from the contact point (Li 2012); particles sharing a crystallographic orientation join directly into larger ones (Zhang 2010). 5. Digestive ripening: Heating a colloid at the solvent’s boiling point with excess surface-active ligand shrank polydisperse 25–50 nm indium particles (Cingarapu 2011); for gold with thiols, single-thiol ligands at 60–120 °C worked best (Sahu 2017). 6. Size-selective precipitation: More anti-solvent destabilises and precipitates the largest nanocrystals first; stepwise addition and centrifugation give fractions of decreasing mean size with a narrower size dispersion, acetone being one polar anti-solvent used (Krieg 2021). With aqueous CuInS₂ nanocrystals, acetone gave a first fraction, more acetone a second, and a third stayed in the supernatant (Santos 2020).

Kwon & Hyeon, “Formation mechanisms of uniform nanocrystals via hot-injection and heat-up methods”, Small 2011 (doi:10.1002/smll.201002022); Wuithschick et al., “Turkevich in new robes: key questions answered for the most common gold nanoparticle synthesis”, ACS Nano 2015 (doi:10.1021/acsnano.5b01579); Bilal & Bandyopadhyay, “Controlled growth of citrate-stabilized gold nanoparticles using a semi-continuous seed-mediated route”, Discov. Nano 2025 (doi:10.1186/s11671-025-04189-8); Zhang, Huang & Lin, “Progress of nanocrystalline growth kinetics based on oriented attachment”, Nanoscale 2010 (doi:10.1039/b9nr00047j); Li et al., “Direction-specific interactions control crystal growth by oriented attachment”, Science 2012 (doi:10.1126/science.1219643); Cingarapu et al., “Synthesis of indium nanoparticles: digestive ripening under mild conditions”, Inorg. Chem. 2011 (doi:10.1021/ic200232b); Sahu et al., “Digestive ripening of Au nanoparticles using multidentate ligands”, Langmuir 2017 (doi:10.1021/acs.langmuir.6b03998); Krieg et al., “Monodisperse long-chain sulfobetaine-capped CsPbBr3 nanocrystals and their superfluorescent assemblies”, ACS Cent. Sci. 2021 (doi:10.1021/acscentsci.0c01153); Manthiram et al., “Seeded synthesis of CdSe/CdS rod and tetrapod nanocrystals”, J. Vis. Exp. 2013 (doi:10.3791/50731); Santos et al., “Hydrothermal synthesis of aqueous-soluble copper indium sulfide nanocrystals and their use in quantum dot sensitized solar cells”, Nanomaterials 2020 (doi:10.3390/nano10071252).

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