Stepwise Evolution of Spherical Seeds into 20-Fold Twinned Icosahedra

Interrogating Growing Nanoparticles Several methods can be used to follow the mechanistic steps of a chemical reaction, but the growth of a nanoparticle from a small seed crystal is more difficult to follow. Langille et al. (p. 954 ) used plasmonic gold nanocrystals of different shapes (cubes and octahedral) as seeds for the growth of larger silver nanoparticles. Electron microscopy was used to track the formation of several different particle shapes and internal structures during the growth process.