One-Pot Synthesis of Ultrasmooth, Precisely Shaped Gold Nanospheres via Surface Self-Polishing Etching and Regrowth

Abstract

Despite many seeded methods having been achieved to synthesize spherical nanoparticles, the one-pot synthesis of Au nanospheres with perfect morphology is still a challenge due to nanocrystals tending to adopt a polyhedral morphology to minimize their surface free energy. We present here a one-pot synthesis for precisely shaped and monodispersed single-crystalline Au nanospheres with an ultrasmooth surface and tunable sizes (30–100 nm). During the synthesis, Au nanospheres undergo a unique morphology change from octahedral to spherical shape via selectively surface self-polishing etching induced by the O2/Cl– pair and Ag ion dynamically tailored regrowth direction. The localized surface plasmon resonance property of the Au nanospheres with different sizes is found to match well with the theoretical prediction because of their perfect spherical shapes and uniform sizes. Moreover, this protocol can achieve a large-scale synthesis (more than 500 mL for one time) of Au nanospheres solution with extreme stability due to isotropic surface tension (stored in ethylene glycol for more than 24 months). Such fundamental findings open up unique insights into the formation mechanism of Au nanospheres with precisely controlled size and shape, and they could be useful for the synthesis of other nanospheres.

Mass-determining role in the electrophoretic separation of colloidal plasmonic nanoparticle oligomers

“…S1e †) and the strong plasmonic coupling effect of their assembled gold oligomers. 45 It can also be found that the extinction properties of these gold oligomers are well consistent with the color changes in these bands. 46 All results indicate that the components of these gold oligomers in bands I to IV should be the assemblies of small-sized gold nanospheres.…”

Controllable synthesis of platinum–tin intermetallic nanoparticles with high electrocatalytic performance for ethanol oxidation

“…100 particles were measured to obtain the size distribution histogram of each sample. 51,52 The size is 16.4 ± 1.5 nm for PtSn 4 , 24.5 ± 1.5 nm in width and 5 ± 1.6 nm in length for PtSn 2 , 7.3 ± 1.3 nm for PtSn, 4.3 ± 0.97 nm for Pt 3 Sn, and about 3 nm for commercial Pt/C 53 (Fig. S1-4 †), respectively.…”

Serrated Au Nanoplates via the Sharpening Etching Mode

“…The purified ligand-modified Au nanoplates were redispersed in 500 μL of 0.2 M CTAB solution. Then, HAuCl 4 (5,10,15, or 20 μL, 2 mg/mL) was added to the Au nanoplate solution under vigorous stirring. The etching solution was kept at 30 °C for 3 h.…”