Seedless Initiation as an Efficient, Sustainable Route
to Anisotropic Gold Nanoparticles
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Abstract
Seedless
initiation has been used as a simple and sustainable alternative
to seed-mediated production of two canonical anisotropic gold nanoparticles:
nanorods and nanoprisms. The concentration of reducing agent during
the nucleation event was found to influence the resulting product
morphology, producing nanorods with lengths from 30 to 630 nm and
triangular or hexagonal prisms with vertex-to-vertex lengths ranging
from 120 to over 700 nm. The seedless approach is then used to eliminate
several chemical reagents and reactions steps from classic particle
preparations while achieving almost identical nanoparticle products
and product yields. Our results shed light on factors that influence
(or do not influence) the evolution of gold nanoparticle shape and
present a dramatically more efficient route to obtaining these architectures.
Specifically, using these methods reduces the total amount of reagent
needed to produce nanorods and nanoprisms by as much as 90 wt % and,
to the best of our knowledge, has yielded the first report of spectroscopically
discernible, colloidal gold nanoplates synthesized using a seedless
methodology