How do you reduce solid gold nuggets to a fine gold powder?

depends on how fine you want the powder to be, i guess.





if you precipitate gold from a solution, you'll end up with a gold salt, not metallic gold.





grinding is pretty good for particle sizes down to ~1 micron.





for very small particles, like 1-100 nm, you typically introduce a stabilizing chemical like a thiol, which causes the gold to nucleate and condense into small particles. see this paper for details:


http://www.nanoscience.gatech.edu/zlwang鈥?/a>





not sure what the state of the art is in gold, but i think if you google ';gold nanoparticle synthesis'; you can get a pretty decent idea of what people are capable of:


http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en%26amp;q=gold鈥?/a>





cheersHow do you reduce solid gold nuggets to a fine gold powder?
Dissolve in aqua regia; neutralize and precipitate. Maybe.





If it wasn't gold, I'd suggest getting a hammer and whopin the daylights out of it, but that would just make gold leaf.How do you reduce solid gold nuggets to a fine gold powder?
x60157, aqua regia would work very nicely, but I don't think that's the answer he's looking for.





Gold is a very soft metal, so try grinding it or sanding it.