Highly efficient approach for characterizing nanometer-sized gold particles by capillary electrophoresis

This paper demonstrates that capillary electrophoresis (CE) can be employed for characterizing the sizes of nanometer-scale gold particles. We characterized the gold nanoparticles by effecting CE separation using a buffer of SDS (70 mM) and 3-cyclohexylamino-1-propanesulfonic acid (CAPS; 10 mM) at pH 11.0 and an applied voltage of 18 kV and obtained a linear relationship (R2 > 0.99) between electrophoretic mobilities and size for nanoparticles whose diameters fall in the regime from 5.0 ± 0.5 to 41.2 ± 3.3 nm; the relative standard deviations of these electrophoretic mobilities are <0.8%. We evaluated the feasibility of employing these separation conditions for the size characterization by of gold nanoparticle samples that were synthesized by a rapid microwave heating method. We confirmed that this CE method is a valid one for size characterization by comparing the results obtained by CE with those provided by scanning electron microscopy (SEM); a good correlation exists between these two techniques. Our results demonstrate that CE can be employed to accelerate the analysis of the sizes of nanomaterials.