Abstract
Nanoparticles play an important role in chemical and biological sciences due to their ability to bind and concentrate many molecules on their surface1. Polymers1,2 and silica3,4,5,6,7 are widely used to make nanoparticles, but efforts to make nanoparticles from borosilicate glass—which exhibits high tolerance to chemicals and solvents, combined with excellent mechanical and thermal stability8,9,10—have proved unsuccessful. Here we show that borosilicate nanoparticles (100–500 nm in size) can be synthesized by simply mixing a silicon–boron binary oxide solution, prepared using non-aqueous organic solvents, with water. This induces a vigorous exothermic phase separation in which borosilicate nanoparticles burst out of a silica phase. In addition to potential applications in the life sciences, monodisperse borosilicate particles could also have applications in the production of photonic bandgap devices with high optical contrast, contrast agents for ultrasonic microscopy or chemical filtration membranes11,12,13.
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Change history
23 September 2008
The original version of this letter published online has now been corrected at the end of the abstract, in Fig. 1b, Fig. 5 caption, and in the 'NMR Spectroscopy' section of the Methods. These corrections have been made for all versions of the letter.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge aid from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 200020-101466) and thank A.-S. Chauvin, P. Pechy and especially A. Abraham for help with the NMR experiments and Y. Moser for help with the temperature measurements.
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V.K.P., J.-B.O. and A.S. conceived, designed and performed the experiments. V.K.P., J.-B.O., M.C. and M.A.M.G. analysed the data. V.K.P. and M.A.M.G. co-wrote the paper. M.C. was responsible for the EELS analysis.
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Parashar, V., Orhan, JB., Sayah, A. et al. Borosilicate nanoparticles prepared by exothermic phase separation. Nature Nanotech 3, 589–594 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.262
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.262
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