Single-crystalline gold microplates grown on substrates by solution-phase synthesis

TL;DR

This paper reports a method for growing high-quality, single-crystalline gold microplates directly on solid substrates via solution-phase synthesis, enabling better control and new insights into their growth mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a substrate-grown synthesis technique for gold microplates, improving quality and facilitating detailed growth studies compared to dispersion-based methods.

Findings

Substrate-grown plates have higher quality with fewer contaminants.

Growth models explain evolution of plate size and shape.

Surface remains smooth after regrowth, enabling larger structures.

Abstract

Chemically synthesized single-crystalline gold microplates have been attracting increasing interests because of their potential as high-quality gold films for nanotechnology. We present the growth of tens of nanometer thick and tens of micrometer large single-crystalline gold plates directly on solid substrates by solution-phase synthesis. Compared to microplates deposited on substrates from dispersion phase, substrate-grown plates exhibit significantly higher quality by avoiding severe small-particle contamination and aggregation. Substrate-grown gold plates also open new perspec-tives to study the growth mechanism via intermittent growth and observation cycles of a large number of individual plates. Growth models are proposed to interpret the evolution of thickness, area and shape of plates. It is found that the plate surface remains smooth after regrowth, implying the application of regrowth for producing giant plates as well as unique single-crystalline nano-structures.