Possible morphologies of Au Nanoparticles – Octahedron

Compare the idealised polyhedron structure with the structures calculated for various numbers of gold atoms by Density Functional Theory.

The octahedron structure can be truncated from cube. This is a face-centered cubic packed structure. In most of cases, this shape favours large size nanoparticles. Moreover, it can be further chopped into several truncated octahedrons (such as truncated octahedron and cuboctahedron).

The structures were obtained from the literature (A. S. Barnard, Accounts of Chemical Research, 2012, 45, 1688-1697).