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Abstract Reconfigurable hybrid nanoparticles made by decorating flexible polymer shells on rigid inorganic nanoparticle cores can provide a unique means to build stimuli‐responsive functional materials. The polymer shell reconfiguration has been expected to depend on the local core shape details, but limited systematic investigations have been undertaken. Here, two literature methods are adapted to coat either thiol‐terminated polystyrene (PS) or polystyrene‐poly(acrylic acid) (PS‐b‐PAA) shells onto a series of anisotropic gold nanoparticles of shapes not studied previously, including octahedron, concave cube, and bipyramid. These core shapes are complex, rendering shell contours with nanoscale details (e.g., local surface curvature, shell thickness) that are imaged and analyzed quantitatively using the authors' customized analysis codes. It is found that the hybrid nanoparticles based on the chosen core shapes, when coated with the above two polymer shells, exhibit distinct shell segregations upon a variation in solvent polarity or temperature. It is demonstrated for the PS‐b‐PAA‐coated hybrid nanoparticles, the shell segregation is maintained even after a further decoration of the shell periphery with gold seeds; these seeds can potentially facilitate subsequent deposition of other nanostructures to enrich structural and functional diversity. These synthesis, imaging, and analysis methods for the hybrid nanoparticles of anisotropically shaped cores can potentially aid in their predictive design for materials reconfigurable from the bottom up.
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Synthesis of multifunctional amorphous metallic shell on crystalline metallic nanoparticles
A universal synthesis strategy of coating crystalline core colloidal nanoparticles with amorphous metallic glass shell. We can form conformal CoB and NiB shell coatings with controlled thicknesses on different sized Au and Pt core nanoparticles.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2037652
- PAR ID:
- 10508504
- Publisher / Repository:
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- RSC Advances
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 43
- ISSN:
- 2046-2069
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 30491 to 30498
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/d3ra06093d
