Description:

These gold nanoboxes are created by reacting silver nanocubes with an aqueous solution of HAuCl₄.  This converted the silver into soluble silver chloride and gold formed in its place. The resulting hollow nanoboxes were bounded by two sets of facets - eight triangular facets and six square ones. The boxes, which were roughly 20% larger than the silver nanocube templates, self-assembled into a close-packed two-dimensional array.  Here is a typical scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of gold nanoboxes. The inset shows the SEM image of an individual box sitting on a silicon substrate against one of its triangular facets.

The gold nanoboxes are expected to have a plasmon resonance band shifted to the near infrared - a spectral region particularly useful for many biorelated applications because our skins are transparent in this window.  As a result, the gold nanoboxes could be used as lightweight fillers for conductive composites and for phototriggered drug delivery.
 

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