The Role of Polymers in the Synthesis of Noble Metal Nanoparticles: A Review.

Lately, many efforts have been devoted to finding more efficient methods to prepare metal nanoparticles with controlled shapes and sizes, low polydispersity, high purity and good stability in a specific dispersion medium. Therefore, it is highly desired to develop synthetic routes that can contribute to tune the properties of metal nanoparticles for their potential applications in diverse scientific and technological fields. Thus, the application of polymers in the synthesis of metal nanoparticles has attracted great interest due to the better understanding of the parameters involved in the stabilization processes of metal nanoparticles. In addition, the use of polymers in the chemical reduction of metal ions in solution has also attracted much attention recently. Thus, this field of research is growing in importance because it would be possible, for example, to prepare hybrid nanocomposites by using non-toxic reagents and simplified synthetic routes. However, control of the shape, improvement of the size distribution and establishing correlations between polymer structure and characteristics of noble metal nanoparticles are still challenging tasks that should be considered in the synthesis processes in order to obtain hybrid nanomaterials with desirable properties.