Anisotropic Growth of Titania onto Various Gold Nanostructures: Synthesis, Theoretical Understanding, and Optimization for Catalysis

Abstract

How does your garden grow? A facile method can tune the anisotropic growth of TiO2 onto differently shaped gold nanoparticles to form Janus, eccentric, and concentric geometries (see picture). The Janus Au-TiO2 nanostructures were found to be energetically stable using calculations, and they possess the highest catalytic activity out of all three geometries due to the highly accessible, exposed gold core on one side.