Gold is going forensic

Abstract

Not long ago, forensic science was mainly focused on fingerprint detection. With the advance in science and technology, forensics has become an increasingly interesting scientific field to explore, and gold is playing an increasingly important role in this area. Gold compounds and gold nanoparticles contribute to fingerprint detection and illicit drug testing. Fingerprints can be detected on diverse suspected articles after being covered with gold followed by another metal such as zinc utilizing vacuum metal deposition technique. An important advantage of using gold in forensic science has been the long-term storage of developed fingerprints due to its inert nature in addition to the high selectivity and the sensitivity of gold nanoparticles. Gold also forms microcrystals with cocaine and heroin of identifiable morphology.

Frontiers in Gold Chemistry

“…The application of gold in this interesting area of research represents a major step forward in gold chemistry [7].…”

Modern Techniques for Determining the Sizes of Gold Nanoparticles

“…In this work, we focus on metal and, in particular, gold nanoparticles. Gold nanoparticles have attracted extensive attention due to their applications in various fields, such as medicine, biotechnology, catalysis, and nanoscale electronics, and are thus the most intensively studied nanoparticles [2][3][4][5]. Great interest in the study of structures of different chemical composition, structure and morphology is caused by extraordinary physicochemical, electromagnetic, optical, mechanical and other properties of nanomaterials that opens wide prospects of their practical applications [6-9,10].…”

Latent Fingermark Imaging by Single-Metal Deposition of Gold Nanoparticles and Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy

“…These two-steps techniques consist in using metal NP, either gold (Au) or silver (Ag) to reveal a fingermark independently from its chemical composition and from the substrate porosity. They combine an important sensitivity to a high selectivity, as the NPs will preferentially attach on the fingermark compounds (Mohamed, 2011). The most important advantage of these methods is the universality with which they allow detection on non-porous, semi-porous and porous surfaces.…”