Effects of Disproportionation Kinetics over the Morphology of Cu colloidal Nanocrystals

Cu nanocrystals (NCs) are promising catalysts for CO2 electroreduction, and there is currently a great interest to expand the library of Cu NCs to improve their catalytic performance. Unfortunately, clear guiding principles for their synthesis are lacking and this prevents the rational synthesis of Cu NCs. We aim to further advance the understanding of the formation mechanism of Cu NCs to include icosahedra, 2D plates, rhombic dodecahedra, octahedra, etc. all of which can be synthesized from the same synthetic methods through variation of the nature of one reactant along with the heating conditions. We hypothesize that reaction kinetics regulate the growth of the different shapes. Thus, we propose the systematic investigation of different additives and heating conditions on the reaction kinetics, and how these determine the size and morphology of the Cu NCs.