Controllable synthesis of gold nanowires

In this work, we demonstrate a new and simple method for preparing Au nanowires by ethanol reduction of hydrogen tetrachloroaurate (HAuCl4) without additional capping agents by a thermal process. The resulting products were investigated by UV-vis spectroscopy. transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results indicated that the size and shape of the Au nanocrystals could be controlled by systematic variation of the experimental parameters including the concentration of HAuCl4 in the reaction solution, heating temperature and reaction time. We suggest that this method introduced in our work may be more practical for the large-scale synthesis of shape-controlled metal nanomaterials. (c) 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.