Micelle-directed chiral seeded growth on anisotropic gold nanocrystals

Groovy chiral gold particles Although plasmonic optical activity can arise from chiral assemblies of gold and silver nanoparticles, there are few examples of gold nanoparticles with intrinsic chirality and high optical activity. González-Rubio et al. show that morphological chirality can be induced during the seeded growth of gold nanoparticles, particularly for highly anisotropic nanorods. Chiral additives as cosurfactants formed helical micelles that directed the seeded growth to create grooves that maintained a chiral morphology. The resulting particles displayed high-intensity circular dichroism with anisotropy factors near 0.2 at near-infrared wavelengths. Science , this issue p. 1472