In the past 50 years, scientific research dedicated many efforts to the study of the development of colloidal nanoparticle synthesis, considering their enormous technological applications and the fundamental scientific interest.
The foundations of metal colloid science were laid by Michael Faraday in the 19th century with his ground-breaking experiments on gold sols.
Then numerous experimental methods for the synthesis of metal, metal oxide and semiconductor NPs have been developed. One of the first and most famous synthesis procedure was the reduction of chloroauric acid in aqueous solution by trisodium citrate, by John Turkevich, a professor of chemistry in Princeton and a pioneer in the field of catalysis.
The classical nucleation theory by Becker and Döring could explain the underlying processes of colloidal formation of such syntheses as a basic model. Nevertheless, several studies demonstrated that the classical nucleation theory fails to describe nanoparticle growth.
“Nucleation theory is one of the few areas of science in which agreement of predicted and measured rates to within several orders of magnitude is considered as major success”.
As a result, even after more than 150 years of research in the field of metal colloids, formation mechanisms of NPs are still discussed controversially. No theory or theoretical model exists so far that is able to describe or predict the evolution of the particle size or size distribution comprehensively.
The study of nanoparticles formation, growth, morphology, with its relation with the catalytic activity and selectivity, is on the basis of MatHeC research.