Corner-, edge-, and facet-controlled growth of nanocrystals

Yuanwei Li; Haixin Lin; Wenjie Zhou; Lin Sun; Devleena Samanta; Chad A Mirkin

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abf1410

Corner-, edge-, and facet-controlled growth of nanocrystals

Sci Adv. 2021 Jan 15;7(3):eabf1410. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abf1410. Print 2021 Jan.

Authors

Yuanwei Li^{1

2}, Haixin Lin^{2

3}, Wenjie Zhou^{2

3}, Lin Sun^{2

4}, Devleena Samanta^{2

3}, Chad A Mirkin^{5

2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
² International Institute for Nanotechnology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
³ Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
⁴ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
⁵ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. chadnano@northwestern.edu.

Abstract

The ability to precisely control nanocrystal (NC) shape and composition is useful in many fields, including catalysis and plasmonics. Seed-mediated strategies have proven effective for preparing a wide variety of structures, but a poor understanding of how to selectively grow corners, edges, and facets has limited the development of a general strategy to control structure evolution. Here, we report a universal synthetic strategy for directing the site-specific growth of anisotropic seeds to prepare a library of designer nanostructures. This strategy leverages nucleation energy barrier profiles and the chemical potential of the growth solution to control the site-specific growth of NCs into exotic shapes and compositions. This strategy can be used to not only control where growth occurs on anisotropic seeds but also control the exposed facets of the newly grown regions. NCs of many shapes are synthesized, including over 10 here-to-fore never reported NCs and, in principle, many others are possible.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).