Tuning the surface concavity of gold nanocrystals using a syringe pump

We report a facile synthesis of cubic/cuboidic gold nanocrystals with tunable surface concavity via seeded growth. The key to the success of this work lies in the use of syringe pump to change the injection rate of the metal precursor and thus manipulation over atomic deposition versus surface diffusion . The formation mechanism and the morphology-dependent plasmonic properties, as well as electrochemical behavior are analyzed.