However, any undesired disturbance can greatly

influence the morphologies of silver nanocrystals. For example, Tsuji et al. [26] demonstrated that there was a significant difference in the yield and average size of silver nanowires when they varied the reaction temperature or reaction atmosphere with PVPMW=40,000. As a result, although numerous nanocrystals have been obtained, PVPMW=40,000 is not the best choice for high-yield synthesis of silver nanocrystals due to limitations in production efficiency, yield, and reproducibility. PVPMW=1,300,000 has both the strongest interaction of PVP on the surface of silver nanocrystals and the ability of anti-agglomeration arising from longest chains, inducing the formation of twinned pentahedron selleck inhibitor seeds which can be observed in Figure 6d. According to the growth mechanism of silver nanowires reported by Xia et al. [29], twinned pentahedron seeds will evolve into nanowires finally. Conclusions In this study, we exhibit that the MW of PVP plays a critical role in the shape control of silver nanocrystals. The function of PVP on the shape control of silver nanocrystals can be discussed from two aspects: adsorption effect and steric effect. Results suggest that adsorption selleck kinase inhibitor effect holds the dominated position in the selective adsorption of PVP on (100) facets of silver nanocrystals when the MW of PVP is

very small, while with the increase of MW, the chemical adsorption Rutecarpine gradually takes the place of the former. Therefore, different silver nanocrystals can be obtained by varying MWs of PVP. In addition, compared with the products obtained by varying the concentrations of PVP, we find that the MW of PVP plays a more efficient role in shape control. Our study on the effect of PVP with different MWs paves the

way for the synthesis of silver monodisperse nanospheres and nanowires in high yield. Acknowledgements This work is supported by NSFC under grant number 61307066, Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China under grant numbers 20110092110016 and 20130092120024, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under grant number BK20130630, the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under grant number 2011CB302004, and the Foundation of Key Laboratory of Micro-Inertial Instrument and Advanced Navigation Technology, Ministry of Education, China under grant number 201204. References 1. Personick ML, Langille MR, Zhang J, Wu J, Li S, Mirkin CA: Plasmon-mediated synthesis of silver cubes with unusual twinning structures using short wavelength excitation. Small 2013, 9:1947–1953.CrossRef 2. Zhang XY, Hu AM, Zhang T, Lei W, Xue XJ, Zhou YH, Duley WW: Self-assembly of large-scale and ultrathin silver nanoplate films with tunable plasmon resonance properties. ACS Nano 2011, 5:9082–9092.CrossRef 3.