We report a dramatically improved synthesis of colloidal gold nanorods (NRs) using a binary surfactant mixture composed of hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and sodium oleate (NaOL). Both thin (diameter <25 nm) and thicker (diameter >30 nm) gold NRs with exceptional monodispersity and broadly tunable longitudinal surface plasmon resonance can be synthesized using seeded growth at reduced CTAB concentrations (as low as 0.037 M). The CTAB-NaOL binary surfactant mixture overcomes the difficulty of growing uniform thick gold NRs often associated with the single-component CTAB system and greatly expands the dimensions of gold NRs that are accessible through a one-pot seeded growth process. Gold NRs with large overall dimensions and thus high scattering/absorption ratios are ideal for scattering-based applications such as biolabeling as well as the enhancement of optical processes.

The ability to engineer surface properties of nanocrystals (NCs) is important for various applications, as many of the physical and chemical properties of nanoscale materials are strongly affected by the surface chemistry. Here, we report a facile ligand-exchange approach, which enables sequential surface functionalization and phase transfer of colloidal NCs while preserving the NC size and shape. Nitrosonium tetrafluoroborate (NOBF4) is used to replace the original organic ligands attached to the NC surface, stabilizing the NCs in various polar, hydrophilic media such as N,N-dimethylformamide for years, with no observed aggregation or precipitation. This approach is applicable to various NCs (metal oxides, metals, semiconductors, and dielectrics) of different sizes and shapes. The hydrophilic NCs obtained can subsequently be further functionalized using a variety of capping molecules, imparting different surface functionalization to NCs depending on the molecules employed. Our work provides a versatile ligand-exchange strategy for NC surface functionalization and represents an important step toward controllably engineering the surface properties of NCs.

We report an improved synthesis of colloidal gold nanorods (NRs) by using aromatic additives that reduce the concentration of hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide surfactant to ~0.05 M as opposed to 0.1 M in well-established protocols. The method optimizes the synthesis for each of the 11 additives studied, allowing a rich array of monodisperse gold NRs with longitudinal surface plasmon resonance tunable from 627 to 1246 nm to be generated. The gold NRs form large-area ordered assemblies upon slow evaporation of NR solution, exhibiting liquid crystalline ordering and several distinct local packing motifs that are dependent upon the NR's aspect ratio. Tailored synthesis of gold NRs with simultaneous improvements in monodispersity and dimensional tunability through rational introduction of additives will not only help to better understand the mechanism of seed-mediated growth of gold NRs but also advance the research on plasmonic metamaterials incorporating anisotropic metal nanostructures.

The discovery of quasicrystals in 1984 changed our view of ordered solids as periodic structures and introduced new long-range-ordered phases lacking any translational symmetry. Quasicrystals permit symmetry operations forbidden in classical crystallography, for example five-, eight-, ten- and 12-fold rotations, yet have sharp diffraction peaks. Intermetallic compounds have been observed to form both metastable and energetically stabilized quasicrystals; quasicrystalline order has also been reported for the tantalum telluride phase with an approximate Ta(1.6)Te composition. Later, quasicrystals were discovered in soft matter, namely supramolecular structures of organic dendrimers and tri-block copolymers, and micrometre-sized colloidal spheres have been arranged into quasicrystalline arrays by using intense laser beams that create quasi-periodic optical standing-wave patterns. Here we show that colloidal inorganic nanoparticles can self-assemble into binary aperiodic superlattices. We observe formation of assemblies with dodecagonal quasicrystalline order in different binary nanoparticle systems: 13.4-nm Fe(2)O(3) and 5-nm Au nanocrystals, 12.6-nm Fe(3)O(4) and 4.7-nm Au nanocrystals, and 9-nm PbS and 3-nm Pd nanocrystals. Such compositional flexibility indicates that the formation of quasicrystalline nanoparticle assemblies does not require a unique combination of interparticle interactions, but is a general sphere-packing phenomenon governed by the entropy and simple interparticle potentials. We also find that dodecagonal quasicrystalline superlattices can form low-defect interfaces with ordinary crystalline binary superlattices, using fragments of (3(3).4(2)) Archimedean tiling as the 'wetting layer' between the periodic and aperiodic phases.

Lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) have emerged as attractive nanomaterials owing to their excellent optical and optoelectronic properties. Their intrinsic instability and soft nature enable a post-synthetic controlled chemical transformation. We studied a ligand mediated transformation of presynthesized CsPbBr NCs to a new type of lead-halide depleted perovskite derivative nanocrystal, namely CsPbBr. The transformation is initiated by amine addition, and the use of alkyl-thiol ligands greatly improves the size uniformity and chemical stability of the derived NCs. The thermodynamically driven transformation is governed by a two-step dissolution-recrystallization mechanism, which is monitored optically. Our results not only shed light on a decomposition pathway of CsPbBr NCs but also present a method to synthesize uniform colloidal CsPbBr NCs, which may actually be a common product of perovskite NCs degradation.