title: Assembly of Ultrathin Gold Nanowires: From Polymer Analogue to Colloidal Block.
abstract: Ultrathin nanowires (NWs) are considered to be ideal building blocks for the assembly of complex nanostructures toward future nanodevices. The polymer/particle duality of ultrathin NWs plays an important role in the study of solution phase self-assembly behavior of ultrathin NWs; yet it has not been fully exploited. Herein, we demonstrate the effects of the polymer/particle duality of ultrathin NWs on the morphologies of assembled complex nanostructures. The length of ultrathin AuNWs directly correlates with the flexibility of NWs and affects the polymer-like assembly of NWs, while the concentration of surfactants determines interfacial tension and ligand-solvent interactions and affects both polymer-like and colloidal assembly of NWs. By fine-tuning these two factors, ultrathin AuNWs can swing between "soft" and "hard" building blocks, and highly uniform nanorings, nanograins, nanobundles, and superlattice-like nanospheres are obtained. The different assembly behavior of long and short NWs can be considered as two components to construct anisotropic complex nanostructures, in analogy with the fabrication of polymer-inorganic nanoparticle hybrid nanostructures. We synthesized anisotropic structures of Au nanodiamond rings and nanonecklaces by the coassembly of polymer-like long NWs with particle-like short NWs or Au nanoparticles. This strategy could potentially be extended to the organization of anisotropic complex nanostructures with other ultrathin NW systems in the future.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomaterials, College of Materials, Xiamen University , Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Institute of Advanced Synthesis, School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Jiangsu National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials, Nanjing Tech University , Nanjing 211816, China.
authors.forename: Yawen
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomaterials, College of Materials, Xiamen University , Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Research Institute for Biomimetics and Soft Matter, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Soft Functional Materials, Xiamen University , Xiamen, 361005, China.
authors.forename: Qingchi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomaterials, College of Materials, Xiamen University , Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Weng
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Research Institute for Biomimetics and Soft Matter, Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory for Soft Functional Materials, Xiamen University , Xiamen, 361005, China.
authors.forename: Jun
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-3096-3217
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xu
keywords: anisotropic nanostructures; emulsion; polymer-like assembly; self-assembly; ultrathin gold nanowires