Unusual 4H-phase twinned noble metal nanokites

Wenxin Niu; Jiawei Liu; Jingtao Huang; Bo Chen; Qiyuan He; An-Liang Wang; Qipeng Lu; Ye Chen; Qinbai Yun; Jie Wang; Cuiling Li; Ying Huang; Zhuangchai Lai; Zhanxi Fan; Xue-Jun Wu; Hua Zhang

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-10764-2

Unusual 4H-phase twinned noble metal nanokites

Nat Commun. 2019 Jun 28;10(1):2881. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-10764-2.

Authors

Wenxin Niu^{1

2}, Jiawei Liu¹, Jingtao Huang¹, Bo Chen¹, Qiyuan He¹, An-Liang Wang¹, Qipeng Lu¹, Ye Chen¹, Qinbai Yun¹, Jie Wang¹, Cuiling Li¹, Ying Huang¹, Zhuangchai Lai¹, Zhanxi Fan¹, Xue-Jun Wu¹, Hua Zhang^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Programmable Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
² State Key Laboratory of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022, China.
³ Center for Programmable Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798, Singapore. hzhang@ntu.edu.sg.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. hzhang@ntu.edu.sg.

Abstract

Twinning commonly exists in noble metals. In recent years, it has attracted increasing interest as it is powerful to tune the physicochemical properties of metallic nanomaterials. To the best of our knowledge, all the reported twinned noble metal structures exclusively possess the close-packed {111} twinning plane. Here, we report the discovery of non-close-packed twinning planes in our synthesized Au nanokites. By using the bent Au nanoribbons with unique 4H/face-centered cubic)/4H crystal-phase heterostructures as templates, Au nanokites with unusual twinned 4H-phase structures have been synthesized, which possess the non-close-packed {10[Formula: see text]2} or {10[Formula: see text]6} twinning plane. By using the Au nanokites as templates, twinned 4H-phase Au@Ag and Au@PdAg core-shell nanostructures have been synthesized. The discovery of 4H-phase twinned noble metal nanostructures may pave a way for the preparation of metal nanomaterials with unique twinned structures for various promising applications.