Influence of van der Waals Interactions between the Alkyl Chains of Surface Ligands on the Size and Size Distribution of Nanocrystals Prepared by the Digestive Ripening Process.

Thermal heating of polydispersed nanocrystals (NCs) with surface-active organic ligands in a solvent leads to the formation of monodispersed NCs, and this process is known as digestive ripening (DR). Here, by performing DR on Au NCs using different-chain-length amine and thiol ligands, we evidently show that ligands with C chain length result in the formation of NCs with narrow size distributions when compared to C, C, and C chain length ligands. Furthermore, our findings also show that in the case of alkyl thiol, the NC size remains more or less the same, while the size distribution gets altered significantly with the chain length.