These liquids may be useful as self-healing, electrically conductive lubricants.

Electrically conductive, solventless nanoparticle liquids, consisting of gold nanoparticles chemically functionalized with large organic molecular groups, have been investigated for potential utility in electronic and electrical applications. These and other solventless nanoparticle liquids, including electrically nonconductive ones, have been topics of recent research directed toward understanding and exploiting their unusual properties. The most obvious unusual property is that a collection of nanoparticles of this type can flow in a liquid-like fashion, notwithstanding the absence of free solvent molecules. By modifying the attractive and repulsive forces between the nanoparticles through modifications of the surface chemistry of the organic ligands, the properties of the resulting nanoparticle liquids can be tailored for specific applications.

A Nanoparticle-Liquid Specimen was made by exchanging 30-nm citrate-capped gold nanoparticles MPS, then treating the MPS-functionalized nanoparticles with methyltrialkyl(C8-C10)ammonium chloride. In this transmission electron micrograph, the gold nanoparticles appear dark and a corona of methyltrialkyl(C8-C10)ammonium chloride linking the nanoparticles is shown at low contrast against the background. The scale bars represent a length of 50 nm.

The nanoparticle liquids were chemically characterized by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, zeta-potential measurements, inductively-coupled-plasma atomic-emission spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance. These characterizations were performed to contribute to understanding of the effects of the chemical synthesis and treatment processes and thereby to enable improvement of these processes.