Nanodiamonds: Shedding Light on the Future of Nanomedicine-Juniper publishers
Global Journal of Nanomedicine-Juniper publishers Introduction While nanodiamonds (NDs) have emerged recently in the biomedical field, their discovery actually dates back to the 1960s where Russian scientists first noticed the tiny diamond crystals in the remnants of their carbon-based explosives [ 1 - 3 ]. Today, the smallest NDs (typically< 10 nm) are produced using an explosion process, and the resultant products are called detonation NDs (DNDs). The larger NDs are produced by either a high pressure-high temperature (HPHT) process or via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) [ 2 - 4 ], followed by a ball-milling process to crush the micron sized diamonds into NDs, and finally washed in strong acids to remove surface impurities. To make fluorescent nanodiamonds (FNDs), high-energy sources (e.g. electrons, He+, or H+ ions) are used to bombard the HPHT or CVD diamonds to create color vacancy centers within the diamond lattice [ 5 - 7 ]. DNDs have seen increasin...