RESEARCH PAPER Surface plasmon resonance promotion of homogeneous catalysis using a gold nanoparticle platform D. Andrew Knight • Rafaela Nita • Martin Moore • Dan Zabetakis • Manish Khandelwal • Brett D. Martin • Jake Fontana • Efram Goldberg • Aaron R. Funk • Eddie L. Chang • Scott A. Trammell Received: 8 December 2013 / Accepted: 1 April 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract Reaction of 10 nm gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) with a thiol-functionalized bipyridine cop- per(II) complex, Cu[(N-(6-mercaptohexyl)-2,2 0 -bipyr- idinyl-5-carboxamide)]Cl 2 (3), and (1-mercaptohex-6- yl)tri(ethylene glycol) (5) in different ratios resulted in mixed monolayer modified NPs with varying surface coverage of capping agent. The copper complex modified NPs were used for surface plasmon resonance (SPR) promoted homogeneous catalysis applied to the hydrolysis of the nerve agent methyl parathion (MeP) at pH 8.0. Low power green laser (532 nm) irradiation of solutions of modified AuNPs with MeP resulted in significant increase in the rate of phosphate ester hydrolysis which could not be attributed to a thermal process. Ratios of initial rates (laser/dark) at high substrate concentrations of MeP as a function of copper catalyst coverage were determined. A possible mech- anism for catalytic enhancement involving dissocia- tion of catalytically inactive hydroxy-bridged Cu(II) dimer is discussed. Keywords Gold nanoparticles  Catalysis  Organophosphate esters  Copper complexes Introduction Active plasmonics can be used to drive chemical reactions at nanoparticle (NP) surfaces. Recently, Fasciani et al. reported that photoexcitation of gold NPs (AuNPs) at 532 nm promoted a high energy reaction at high temperature. Namely, the complete homolysis of dicumyl peroxide to cumyl radicals occurred in\ 1 min, and the authors suggested that the peroxide was exposed to temperatures in excess of 500 °C for periods of submicroseconds (Fasciani et al. 2011). This presents an intriguing concept whereby active plasmonics could be applied to an extensive number of reactions in synthetic chemistry. Mecha- nisms for energy coupling to the local environment around metal NPs are shown in Fig. 1. Redox reactions promoted by plasmon enhance- ment have also been studied in recent years. Spherical Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11051-014-2400-8) contains supple- mentary material, which is available to authorized users. D. A. Knight (&)  R. Nita  M. Khandelwal  E. Goldberg  A. R. Funk Chemistry Department, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 West University Boulevard, Melbourne, FL 32901, USA e-mail: aknight@fit.edu M. Moore  D. Zabetakis  B. D. Martin  J. Fontana  E. L. Chang  S. A. Trammell (&) Center for Bio/Molecular Science and Engineering, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC 20375, USA e-mail: scott.trammell@nrl.navy.mil Present Address: E. L. Chang National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22230, USA 123 J Nanopart Res (2014) 16:2400 DOI 10.1007/s11051-014-2400-8