Solution-Phase Synthesis of Shape-Controlled Metal Nanocrystals

Controlling the morphology of a metal nanocrystal is critical to modern materials chemistry because its physical and chemical properties can be easily and widely tuned by tailoring the size and shape. Combined with ease of synthesis and processing, metal nanocrystals with desired morphologies and thus properties are promising candidates for a wide variety of applications in catalysis, sensing, imaging, electronics, and photonics, and medicine. In this talk, I would like to introduce my recent research results on the shape-controlled synthesis of metal nanocrystals using a simple aqueous method. This water-based system provides a number of merits such as simplicity, convenience, and the potential for large-scale production and enables us to synthesize metal nanocrystals with a rich variety of shapes such as truncated octahedron, cubes, bars, octahedrons, and thin plates. The ability to control the shape of metal nanocrystals provides a great opportunity to systematically investigate their catalytic and optical properties.