title: Grain size effects in polycrystalline gold nanoparticles.
abstract: We report a structure-property relationship in gold nanoparticles (NPs), grain-size effects, which not only allow material properties observed on different characteristic length scales to be engineered in a single NP but further enhance those properties due to the coupling among different-size grains. The grain size effects were achieved by creating polycrystalline gold NPs (pAuNPs) with two distinct grain-size populations (5 and 1 nm) comparable to electron mean free path and electron Fermi wavelength (EFW), respectively. Successful integration of molecular and plasmonic properties into a single nanostructure without additional fluorophores enables these highly polycrystalline AuNPs to serve as multimodal probes in a variety of optical microscopic imaging techniques.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Texas at Dallas, 800 W Campbell Rd, Richardson, TX 75080, USA.
authors.forename: Chen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Yanping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Qin
authors.forename: Jie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zheng