Study of the affinity of thermographic additives for silver by time-of-flight static secondary ion mass spectrometry and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy on silver nanoparticles

Detection of the interactions between low molecular weight organic compounds and metals in the form of sols on a nanoscale is analytically challenging. This study aims to provide experimental evidence using a combination of UV-Vis absorption spectrometry, surface-enhanced Raman spectrometry (SERS), and static secondary ion mass spectrometry (S-SIMS). The field of application is thermography where silver images are formed via heat-catalyzed reactions. Several organic compounds called tone modifiers and stabilizers are used in thermographic materials for the optimization of the image quality. With exploitation of the strengths of each of the above-mentioned methods, an affinity ranking of several tone modifiers and a stabilizer was established on the basis of competitive adsorption experiments using different model systems. Specifically, silver sols, SERS probes, and sputter-coated silver substrates were exposed to systems with one or two additives. The UV-Vis results provided insight on the aggregation of silver nanoparticles in a hydrosol, which was necessary for the interpretation of the SERS data. Both SERS and S-SIMS measurements led to a similar ranking of the relative affinity of the additives in two components, which was largely consistent with empirical knowledge derived from macroscopic behavior.