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Template-directed synthesis

Producing 'perfect' particles

Nature Chemistry volume 2, pages 6–7 (2010)Cite this article

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Synthetic procedures for making nanoparticles often result in samples that contain a range of different particle sizes. By using hollow self-assembled metal–organic spheres as templates, however, it is possible to make silica nanoparticles with uniform shapes and sizes in a precisely controlled fashion.

Nanoparticles fall into the gap between well-defined atomic or molecular structures and bulk solids. Moreover, the properties of nanoparticles tend to differ greatly from those of the corresponding bulk material — for example, a macroscopic piece of copper is malleable and ductile, whereas copper nanoparticles are extremely hard1. Controlling the size and shape of nanoparticles is important because their functional properties are strongly dependent on these characteristics. Therefore, the development of methods that can produce samples of nanoparticles that are uniform in size — or monodisperse — is particularly important, and requires that the variance of particle size in a given collection — their polydispersity — is precisely controlled during synthesis.

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Figure 1: A self-assembled metal–organic sphere made from 12 metal centres and 24 bridging organic ligands can be used as a surrounding template for the condensation of tetramethylsiloxane to produce silica nanoparticles of precisely defined size2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Boris Breiner and Jonathan R. Nitschke are in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK.,

    Boris Breiner & Jonathan R. Nitschke

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  1. Boris Breiner
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  2. Jonathan R. Nitschke
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Correspondence to Jonathan R. Nitschke.

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Breiner, B., Nitschke, J. Producing 'perfect' particles. Nature Chem 2, 6–7 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.493

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