Elasticity is one of the key properties in gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) and plays an essential
role in the process design and applications. In this work, we have proposed an Argon
plasma based technique to obtain well dispersed and pure AuNPs without surface functional
groups. Our investigation on the size-dependent elasticity focused on the AuNPs with the
size ranging from 2 nm to 12 nm by using an atomic force microscope based
nanoindentation technique under the peakforce quantitative nanomechanical mapping …