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Nanocrystals

Tiny seeds make a big difference

Nature Materials volume 6, pages 625–626 (2007)Cite this article

A seeded-growth approach provides shape-controlled bimetallic nanocrystals and opens the way for a rich selection of new nanoscale building blocks.

Developments in nanotechnology hinge on the synthesis of new materials. Nanoparticles, already widely applied in diverse fields from catalysis to bio-imaging, have undergone tremendous development in the past two decades, where size control of spherical nanocrystals of semiconductors, metals and insulators has been achieved for almost any material. This has prompted widespread research on size-dependent properties of diverse materials, revealing new scaling laws and surprising new phenomena. The control of shape has also been widely applied to various material systems in recent years, providing yet another important handle for changing nanomaterial properties. Examples include the growth of semiconductor rods yielding polarized emission1, and synthesis of metal rods with controlled plasmon resonances that result from their anisotropy2. A new frontier area in nanomaterials research deals with the ability to control composition during particle growth to produce hybrid nanoparticles composed of two or more compounds; diverse combinations of metal–semiconductor and binary-metal nanocomposites have recently been demonstrated3,4. There are thus new challenges for nanomaterial synthesis aiming to control the reaction conditions to achieve either core–shell growth, segregated and site-selective growth, or alloying and mixing effects. As reported on page 692 of this issue5, Susan Habas et al. progress the area of binary-metal nanoparticles, by introducing exquisite control of the shape of the nanoparticles using a technique that combines seeded growth along with careful surface manipulations.

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Figure 1: Shape-controlled bimetallic nanoparticles grown by the seeded-growth approach of Habas and colleagues5.

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  1. Uri Banin is at the Institute of Chemistry and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. uri.banin@huji.ac.il

    Uri Banin

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  1. Uri Banin
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Banin, U. Tiny seeds make a big difference. Nature Mater 6, 625–626 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1993

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1993

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