Facile Fabrication of Ultrafine Copper Nanoparticles in Organic Solvent

Abstract

A facile chemical reduction method has been developed to fabricate ultrafine copper nanoparticles whose sizes can be controlled down to ca. 1 nm by using poly(N-vinylpyrrolidone) (PVP) as the stabilizer and sodium borohyrdride as the reducing agent in an alkaline ethylene glycol (EG) solvent. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) results and UV-vis absorption spectra demonstrated that the as-prepared particles were well monodispersed, mostly composed of pure metallic Cu nanocrystals and extremely stable over extended period of simply sealed storage.