Xiaxia's paper has been published online by Nanoscale. See: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/nr/c4nr00254g

Title: One-step growth of triangular silver nanoplates with predictable sizes on a large scale

Abstract: Synthesis of anisotropic plasmonic nanomaterials in a convenient and mass produced way is highly desired due to their unique and tunable optical (infrared) properties and their broad potential in many plasmon-based applications.  In this work, a one-step synthesis of triangular silver (Ag) nanoplates on a large scale is developed by a coordination-based seeded growth, which takes advantages of the coordinating effect of acetonitrile to a Ag(I) salt to suppress self-nucleation of Ag during the synthesis, and the selective capping effect of TSC on specific facets of the Ag nanocrystals to allow anisotropic growth of the Ag nanostructures.  By tuning the amount of the seeds, we have successfully synthesized triangular Ag nanoplates of uniform size in the range of 150 nm−1.5 μm.  The size of the triangular Ag nanoplates has been conveniently tailored in a stoichiometric way and the in-plane dipolar surface plasmon resonance extends to full near-infrared.  This synthesis can be conveniently scaled up to sub-gram scale in our lab while retaining the high quality of the products, which is difficult to be achieved by conventional methods.  Therefore, it provides a simple yet very robust, scalable, and reproducible route to triangular Ag nanoplates for many practical applications. The strategy demonstrated in this work is also potentially extendable to seeded growth of noble metal nanoparticles of many other morphologies and compositions with similar advantages.