Seedless initiation as an efficient, sustainable route to anisotropic gold nanoparticles

Seedless initiation has been used as a simple and sustainable alternative to seed-mediated production of two canonical anisotropic gold nanoparticles: nanorods and nanoprisms. The concentration of reducing agent during the nucleation event was found to influence the resulting product morphology, producing nanorods with lengths from 30 to 630 nm and triangular or hexagonal prisms with vertex-to-vertex lengths ranging from 120 to over 700 nm. The seedless approach is then used to eliminate several chemical reagents and reactions steps from classic particle preparations while achieving almost identical nanoparticle products and product yields. Our results shed light on factors that influence (or do not influence) the evolution of gold nanoparticle shape and present a dramatically more efficient route to obtaining these architectures. Specifically, using these methods reduces the total amount of reagent needed to produce nanorods and nanoprisms by as much as 90 wt % and, to the best of our knowledge, has yielded the first report of spectroscopically discernible, colloidal gold nanoplates synthesized using a seedless methodology.