Dry plasma synthesis of graphene oxide–Ag nanocomposites: A simple and green approach

• Graphite oxide (GO) is used as the carbon substrates for the fabrication of silver nanoparticles–GO composite.
• Ag can be reduced by dry plasma without solutions.
• Ag nanoparticles are highly monodispersed with uniform size of around 2 nm.
• The Ag–GO composites show excellent antibacterial activity against E. coli.

A room temperature dry reduction approach, i.e., a low pressure dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma jet, was presented to synthesize highly dispersed graphene oxide-based Ag nanoparticles. TEM, EDS, XRD and XPS tests were used for the characterization of the as-prepared nanocomposites. By comparing the Ag nanoparticles prepared by the DBD plasma jet with and without hydrogen plasma pretreatment, it was found that the latter were highly monodispersed with a uniform size of around 2 nm and deposited on the surface of the graphene oxide as a form of face-centered cubic structure, and it also showed a better antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli, which may be due to the smaller particle size, larger surface area and more beneficial dispersity of Ag nanoparticles.

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