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Nanotechnology

Beyond the confines of templates

Nature volume 467, pages 923–924 (2010)Cite this article

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The use of templates to control the morphology of nanostructures is a powerful but inflexible technique. A template that is remodelled during synthesis suggests fresh opportunities for fabricating new nanostructures.

Controlling the morphology of metal nanostructures is central to many applications because it provides an effective means of tailoring the electronic, optical and catalytic properties of those structures1. Reporting in Angewandte Chemie2, Kuroda and Kuroda introduce a new type of two-dimensional gold nanostructure that, intriguingly, is made using a three-dimensional lattice of silica nanospheres as a template. The top and bottom surfaces of the plate-like nanostructure contain patterned arrays of small dimples that are useful for various applications, but difficult to generate using other techniques. This work opens the door to the development of facile methods for producing new types of nanostructured materials.

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Figure 1: Dimpled gold nanoplates.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Younan Xia is in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University, St Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. yxia@biomed.wustl.edu,

    Younan Xia

  2. Byungkwon Lim is in the School of Advanced Materials Science and Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440-746, South Korea. blim@skku.edu ,

    Byungkwon Lim

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  1. Younan Xia
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  2. Byungkwon Lim
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Xia, Y., Lim, B. Beyond the confines of templates. Nature 467, 923–924 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467923a

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