Quantitation of Metal Content in the Silver-Assisted Growth of Gold Nanorods

The seed-mediated approach to making gold nanorods in aqueous surfactant solutions has become tremendously popular in recent years. Unlike the use of strong chemical reductants to make spherical gold nanoparticles, the growth of gold nanorods requires weak reducing conditions, leading to an unknown degree of gold reduction. The metal content of gold nanorods, made in high yield in the presence of silver ion, is determined by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectroscopy. Through the use of the known gold concentration in nanorods, molar extinction coefficients are calculated for nanorods of varying aspect ratios from 2.0 to 4.5. The extinction coefficients at the longitudinal plasmon band peak maxima for these nanorods vary from 2.5 × 109 to 5.5 × 109 M-1 cm-1, respectively, on a per-particle basis. Many of the gold ions present in the growth solution remain unreacted; insights into the growth mechanism of gold nanorods are discussed.