9. Conclusion and outlook

Scientific interest in gold nanoparticles began in the 1980s with gold catalysis and the first steps in plasmonics. Forty years later, scientific topics have shifted, but gold NPs remain the most studied nanometric object in scientific literature. These NPs will continue to play a key role in academic research due to their chemical stability properties, which allow the possibilities of nanoscience to be explored. From this perspective, there are two areas of research where gold NPs appear to be essential:

• In physics, this is nanothermics, where the challenge is to understand and state the laws of thermodynamics at the nanometer scale and over very short time scales (from 10 fs to 1 ns).

• In chemistry, new syntheses of nanomaterials are focusing on the development of chiral plasmonic nanostructures. The aim...