Assembling Gold Nanocubes Into a Nanoporous Gold Material

摘要

Nanoporous gold materials (NGM) have been intensively investigated in a variety of areas such as catalysis, energy storage, electrochemistry, and sensing. They are also particularly attractive as a platform for observing the critical behavior of liquid helium owing to their unique chemical and physical properties such as high surface area and pore volume. The development of NGM synthesis has led to various strategies based upon selective leaching of bimetallic gold alloys, template-based replication, thermal decomposition of gold oxides, thermally and photochemically activated nanoparticle assembly, and electrochemical reactions. These methods, however, require high reaction temperatures, in certain cases even up to 900 °C, and complicated precedent preparation of alloys or oxides of gold. Moreover, these methods are often followed by post-synthetic thermal annealing to control the pore size, which is not only inconvenient but also time consuming.