Seed‐Mediated Synthesis of Single‐Crystal Gold Nanospheres with Controlled Diameters in the Range 5–30 nm and their Self‐Assembly upon Dilution |
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| Authors: | Yiqun Zheng Dr. Yanyun Ma Dr. Jie Zeng Dr. Xiaolan Zhong Dr. Mingshang Jin Prof. Zhi‐Yuan Li Prof. Younan Xia |
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| Affiliation: | 1. School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 (United States), Fax: (+1)?404‐385‐7493;2. Institute of Functional Nano and Soft Materials, Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Carbon‐Based Functional, Materials and Devices, Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123 (P. R. China);3. Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Chemical Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026 (P. R. China);4. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080 (P. R. China);5. Center for Materials Chemistry, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shanxi 710049 (P. R. China);6. The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30332 (United States) |
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| Abstract: | Single‐crystal gold nanospheres with controlled diameters in the range 5–30 nm were synthesized by using a facile approach that was based on successive seed‐mediated growth. The key to the success of this synthesis was the use of hexadecyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC) as a capping agent and a large excess of ascorbic acid as a reductant to ensure fast reduction and, thus, single crystallinity and a spherical shape of the resultant nanoparticles. The diameters of the gold nanospheres could be readily controlled by varying the amount of seeds that were introduced into the reaction system. The gold nanospheres could be produced with uniform diameters of up to 30 nm; thus, their localized surface plasmon resonance properties could be directly compared with the results that were obtained from theoretical calculations. Interestingly, we also found that these gold nanospheres self‐assembled into dimers, larger aggregates, and wavy nanowires when they were collected by centrifugation, dispersed in deionized water, and then diluted to different volumes with deionized water. |
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| Keywords: | gold nanocrystals nanostructures self‐assembly size control |
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