1. Department of Chemistry and Institute for Nanotechnology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA

Correspondence to: George C. Schatz¹Chad A. Mirkin¹ Email: camirkin@chem.northwestern.edu
Email: schatz@chem.northwestern.edu

Abstract

Inorganic nanoparticles exhibit size-dependent properties that are of interest for applications ranging from biosensing^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5} and catalysis⁶ to optics⁷ and data storage⁸. They are readily available in a wide variety of discrete compositions and sizes^{9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14}. Shape-selective synthesis strategies now also yield shapes other than nanospheres, such as anisotropic metal nanostructures with interesting optical properties^{15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23}. Here we demonstrate that the previously described photoinduced method²³ for converting silver nanospheres into triangular silver nanocrystals—so-called nanoprisms—can be extended to synthesize relatively monodisperse nanoprisms with desired edge lengths in the 30–120 nm range. The particle growth process is controlled using dual-beam illumination of the nanoparticles, and appears to be driven by surface plasmon excitations. We find that, depending on the illumination wavelengths chosen, the plasmon excitations lead either to fusion of nanoprisms in an edge-selective manner or to the growth of the nanoprisms until they reach their light-controlled final size.