The Early Life of Gold Nanorods: Temporal Separation of Anisotropic and Isotropic Growth Modes

Abstract

Gold nanorods (AuNRs) are a particularly interesting class of nanomaterials because their dimensions and size-dependent optical properties make them ideally suited for many applications. AuNRs are typically synthesized using seeded growth approaches, in which a small spherical gold nanoparticle seed grows anisotropically into a rod-shaped particle. Using AuNRs themselves as seeds for the growth of other anisotropic shapes has been demonstrated but is relatively little-explored. In this study, we show that AuNRs grown using a common method (silver-assisted seeded growth) cannot be used as seeds in the synthesis of higher aspect ratio AuNRs. Instead, the seed AuNRs grow isotropically, providing a new synthetic approach to precisely tune the absolute dimensions of the final AuNRs. We furthermore show that the dimensions of the AuNRs are determined by the reaction conditions at very early times (<10 min), and that perturbing the growth solution beyond these times has little influence on the final AuNR properties. The observation of these behaviors may be relevant to ongoing investigations of AuNR growth mechanisms.