A review article concerning the state-of-the-art progress on “well-faceted noble-metal nanocrystals with nonconvex polyhedral shapes” is published in Chem. Soc. Rev.
Recently, a review article written by Zhaoxiong Xie’s group titled “Well-faceted noble-metal nanocrystals with nonconvex polyhedral shapes” is published in Chemical Society Reviews (Chem. Soc. Rev., 2016, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C6CS00039H).
Noble-metal nanocrystals (NCs) possess widespread applications. Considering the low reserve and high cost of noble metals, the enhancement of the catalytic performance (including activity and selectivity) and the decrease of the usage has long been a hot frontier subject. From the morphologic point view, well-faceted nonconvex polyhedral NCs, which integrate the advantages of “specific well-defined facets” and “large surface area”, are promising candidates having the characteristics of both outstanding performance and high atom utilization efficiency. This review gives a comprehensive summary of the covered cases of well-faceted noble-metal NCs with nonconvex polyhedral shapes. Owing to the structure complexity of nonconvex shapes, we detailed introduce the corresponding characteristics and surface structure characterization methods by classifying them into three categories. As the growth of nonconvex polyhedral NCs is thermodynamically unfavorable, the strategies on constructing well-faceted nonconvex polyhedral NCs are summarized. What’s more, the fascinating enhanced chemical/physical properties aroused by the well-faceted nonconvex polyhedral noble-metal NCs have also been briefly introduced.
Xie’s group has long been engaged in controlling the surface structure of NCs and exploring their growth mechanism. They have achieved a series of significant progresses and attracted widespread attention, such as firstly realizing the synthesis of noble metal NCs with high-index facets via wet-chemical synthesis, proposing a general supersaturation strategy for tuning the surface structure of NCs, successfully synthesizing unique excavated rhombic dodecahedral PtCu3 NCs constructed by orderly assembling of ultrathin nanosheets.
This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2015CB932301), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21131005, 21333008, and 21401155), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (20720140529).
The link to this review：
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/cs/c6cs00039h
