Nowadays, most of the researches are focused on metal nanoparticles. They have unique properties on magnetic, electronic, optical and chemical behaviour compared to bulk materials, because of their large surface area to volume ratio. Transition metal nanoparticles have the high catalytic activities in organic reactions. But the soluble metal nanoparticles have some problems such as recycling and separation of the catalysts from reactions. To solve these problems it would be better to immobilized them on suitable support materials and use them as heterogeneous catalyst. Therefore, most of current researches are focused on modification of different supports for immobilizated the metal nanoparticle. However, inorganic solides such silica, carbon, clay, zeolites and mixed oxides are widely used to carry metal nanoparticles. Gold metal is used to catalyze the oxidation reaction. Cyclohexene oxide is an important organic intermediate used in the production of pharmaceuticals, plant-protection agents, pesticides and stabilizers for chlorinated hydrocarbons. The oxidation of cyclohexene is often inefficient as there is a C = C bond and four ?-H atoms in the cyclohexene molecule. Oxidation of cyclohexene is an important method for the synthesis of chemical intermediates like 2-cyclohexene-1-ol and 2-cyclohexene-1-one in the manufacture of high-value pharmaceuticals. A greater demand for these oxidation products and increased environmental concerns warrant the introduction of catalytic systems using heterogeneous catalyst and the environmentally friendly oxidants such as molecular oxygen or hydrogen peroxide. The use of H 2 O 2 is efficient because the only by-product is water, but the relatively high cost of H 2 O 2 severely hinders its wide application in catalytic oxidation. On the other hand, catalytic systems using molecular oxygen as the oxidant instead resulted in three important advantages: the facility to separate the catalyst after the reaction, lower energy costs and a higher stability of the irreversible reaction of overoxidantion products.Therefore solvent free oxidation of cyclohexene with molecular oxygen is most important. On this thesis, new nano-gold catalysts synthesized and were characterized by FT-IR, CHNS, BET, TEM and XPS. These nano-gold catalysts have a high activity in solvent free oxidation of cyclohexene.
