Seedless Initiation as an Efficient, Sustainable Routeto Anisotropic Gold Nanoparticles.

Seedlessinitiation has been used as a simple and sustainable alternativeto seed-mediated production of two canonical anisotropic gold nanoparticles:nanorods and nanoprisms. The concentration of reducing agent duringthe nucleation event was found to influence the resulting productmorphology, producing nanorods with lengths from 30 to 630 nm andtriangular or hexagonal prisms with vertex-to-vertex lengths rangingfrom 120 to over 700 nm. The seedless approach is then used to eliminateseveral chemical reagents and reactions steps from classic particlepreparations while achieving almost identical nanoparticle productsand product yields. Our results shed light on factors that influence(or do not influence) the evolution of gold nanoparticle shape andpresent a dramatically more efficient route to obtaining these architectures.Specifically, using these methods reduces the total amount of reagentneeded to produce nanorods and nanoprisms by as much as 90 wt % and,to the best of our knowledge, has yielded the first report of spectroscopicallydiscernible, colloidal gold nanoplates synthesized using a seedlessmethodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]