Recently, gram quantities of monodisperse gold or silver nanoparticles were reported to be
produced through a digestive ripening process, in which colloidal particles of size 2 to 40 nm are
transformed to nearly monodisperse particles of 4 ~ 5 nm diameter. Digestive ripening, an example
for an inverse Ostwald ripening process, is a puzzling phenomenon since it appears to go against the
usual capillary effect, i.e., reduction of interfacial free energy. A theoretical model is presented, which
accounts for the monodisperse state of such nanoparticles by considering the effect of charges on the
particles and thus electrostatic energy during particle size evolution.
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