Inorganic Self-Replicating Nanoparticles

Self-replication is a phenomena found all throughout nature and is fundamental to the understanding life from the atomic to macro scale. This phenomenon is a subset of autocatalysis where an entity solely catalyzes its own formation leading to an exponential growth of identical or statistically identical copies. Self-replication is typically found in organic molecules and materials, but has rarely been observed or explored in inorganic materials. Understanding and discovering this phenomena in inorganic materials opens a whole new field with a lot of potential, especially for fundamentally understanding how self-replication has first developed. The work here seeks to create a novel abiotic colloidal self-replicating system that has never been reported to date. To achieve this, we are exploring the first ever self-replication of plasmonic silver nanoparticle (AgNPs) under UV-illumination straight from its precursor, which was done by carefully tuning the conditions to a critical point at which self-replication is possible. A series of ex-situ and in-situ characterization and imaging methods are implemented to confirm self-replication. Self-replication is validated ex-situ by analyzing the exponential growth in absorbance and NP concentration over time. The phenomena is also observed using in-situ methods to explore real-time dynamics of said replication using various methods, such as liquid transmission electron microscopy (LTEM), Cryo-TEM, and dark-field microscopy. Outside of visual observations, kinetic model simulations were developed to explain and support the claim that the AgNPs are indeed self-replicating and to determine the mechanism at which they have the capability to replicate.