PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT ON THE ELECTROCHEMICAL SYNTHESIS OF 1-D JANUS PARTICLES FOR CHEMICAL SENSING PURPOSES

The dual nature of Janus particles (JPs) confers upon them fascinating properties. The name of this particles is referred to the Roman god of gates, having two opposite and distinct faces. In practice, the term Janus Particles defines all those particles displaying a dual anisotropic structure, in which two parts with distinct characteristics can be distinguished. Possible architecture for JPs are schematized in Fig. 1. Figure 1. Different Janus Particles arrangements. JPs have been prepared by a variety of methods, including: surface coating, biphasic electrified jetting, photo-polymerization in microfluidic channels, polymer self-assembly (1). Bipolar electrochemistry (2) have been applied to the goal of preparing JPs, with the advantages of requiring simple and cheap instrumentation as well as being potentially suitable for relatively large scale production. In this communication, we describe the electrochemical preparation of Janus like 1-D nanowires (J-NWs) in particular by bipolar electrochemistry and by membrane templated electrochemical deposition (3) exploiting the experimental set-up recently proposed (4). Advantages and limits of bipolar electrochemistry vs. template deposition are critically evaluated, taking into account that the final goal of this study is the synthesis of 1D JPs suitable for analytical applications, based on differentiated self-assembly of the J-NWS in response to changes of the chemical environment in which they are suspended. (1) J. Hu, S. Zhou, Y. Sun, X. Fanga, L. Wu. Chemical Society Review, 41 (2012) 4356–4378. (2) G. Loget, V. Lapeyre, P. Garrigue,C. Warakulwit, J. Limtrakul, M.-H. Delville, A. Kuhn. Chemistry of Materials 23 (2011) 2595-2599. (3) P. Ugo, L.M. Moretto, Handbook of Electrochemistry, C. Zoski ed., chp. 16.2, Elsevier, 2007. (4) A. Gambirasi, S. Cattarin, M. Musiani, L. Vázquez-Gómeza, E. Verlato. Electrochimica Acta 56 (2011) 8582-8588.