Hairy gold nanorods: gold nanowire growth on nanosubstrates [Invited]

We report on the synthesis of a new metallic nanoarchitecture, namely, hairy gold nanorods that were carefully designed and engineered the seed-mediated growth of gold nanowires on the sub-nanometer scale gold nanorod substrate. The thickness of the gold nanowires grown could be tuned from 5 to 9 nm by controlling the ratio of HAuCl4 to 4-Mercaptobenzoic acid (MBA) from 2.5 to 25 while the length of gold nanowires could be controlled between 47 nm to 15 mu m by varying the concentration of silica coated gold nanorod in the gold solution. The high-aspect-ratio hairy gold nanowires tethered to concentric gold nanorod could be used for fabrication of soft flexible high performance resistive strain sensors and soft surface-enhanced Raman scattering substrate. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement