Facile Synthesis of Concave Cuboid Au NCs with Precisely Tunable Dimensions and Mechanistic Insight

Abstract

Concave cuboid (CCB) nanostructure is a member of the high-index facet (HIF) nanocrystals (NCs) family, geometrically derived from regular cuboid-excavation of each face. CCB NCs hold some additional characteristics such as surface cavity and sharp edges and corners as compared to its convex counterpart that makes it relatively more active in applications like electrochemical catalysis, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), and plasmonics. To date, there are only few reports available on the synthesis of CCB Au NCs where Br– containing surfactants have been used as a shape directing and stabilizing agent. However, none of them led to decent yield and size tunability. Herein, we report a robust seed mediated growth strategy where cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC) and tannic acid (TA) have been used as shape-directing/stabilizing and mild reducing agents, respectively. Our method not only allows the high yield fabrication of CCB Au NCs with uniform shape and size but also precise control over dimensions and degree of surface concavity. Moreover, the investigation of growth mechanism revealed that the evolution of CCB Au NCs from cylindrical nanorods (NRs) take place via arrow-headed nanorods and truncated CCB nanostructures. Furthermore, it has been observed that the presence of excess of Cl– is indeed playing a decisive role despite the headgroup of counter cationic part of surfactant. We anticipate that our findings may pave the path to design new synthetic strategies and understand the evolution of new nanostructures.