Gold buckyballs, oft-used nanoparticle ‘seeds’ found to be one and the same
Illustration of a typical anisotropic metal nanoparticle synthesis. Reactions proceed via the rapid reduction of a gold halide salt a to nucleate small seed particles b, which then act as heterogeneous nucleation sites in a subsequent reaction to facilitate the controlled growth of particles with well-defined shapes c. This work identifies the seed intermediates as an atomically precise cluster…