Dear Satyam,
the answer surely depends on the demands you have on your particles (e.g. polydispersity index and your understanding of cheap). An interesting approach is the production of NPs by laser ablation in liquids, since it is an easy method and gives particles which are free of residuals, making it attractive for biomedical applications. A nice approach to the method is given in the following paper:
Wagener, P., Barcikowski, S., Bärsch, N., & Gmbh, P. (2011). Fabrication of nanoparticles and nanomaterials using laser ablation in liquids. Photonics International, 1, 2–5.
Yet, a laser with high pulse energies is required for the synthesis and a strict monodispersity is hard to obtain, but laser ablated Ag NPs can readily be bought.
I think, the standard-citrate-synthesis might be what you are looking for. A modification towards higher monodispersity and particle size control has been described very recently:
Steinigeweg, D., & Schlücker, S. (2012). Monodispersity and size control in the synthesis of 20-100 nm quasi-spherical silver nanoparticles by citrate and ascorbic acid reduction in glycerol-water mixtures. Chemical communications (Cambridge, England), 48(69), 8682–4. doi:10.1039/c2cc33850e
I hope I could help you with this,
Ralf
Our group published a paper on the synthesis of Ag NP using a new approach: Spontaneous formation of highly dispersed spheroidal metallic silver nanoparticles in surfactant-free N,N-dimethylacetamide Original Research Article
Synthetic Metals, Volume 161, Issues 15–16, August 2011, Pages 1517-1521
Luiz Pereira da Costa, André Luiz Barboza Formiga, Italo Odone Mazali, Fernando Aparecido Sigoli
The advantage from this method is that no stabilizer is necessary once that the solvent (DMA) is resposible for the reduction of Ag+ to Ag0 and for the stabilization.
You can use laser ablation in liquid as suggested by Mr. Neimann or alternatively you can opt for chemical methods such as optimized polyol method with PVP as surfactant.
polyol method using citric acid capping agent and hydrazine reduction could be one cheap method.
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