X-ray Spectroscopy of Silver Nanostructures toward Antibacterial Applications

Ag nanostructures have a wide variety of uses in areas such as biological science and catalysis. Determination of the structural properties of Ag nanostructures can assist in the understanding of the mechanisms involved in these processes. This review provides a summary of recently published work with Ag nanostructures including very small Ag nanoclusters, larger Ag nanocrystals, and Ag nanoalloys. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is used to elucidate structural and electronic information about the Ag nanostructures, which is then used to provide insight as to the antibacterial activities of the Ag nanostructures. Some unique features of our XAS analysis on Ag nanostructures include multiedge and multielement measurements, multishell fitting and wavelet transformation (WT) of extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), and the correlation between X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) and density functional theory (DFT) modeling.