Electroless Plating of Metal Nanomaterials

Electroless plating is commonly associated with metallizing macroscopic work pieces, but also represents a surprisingly powerful nanomanufacturing tool. This review details the technique's use for creating nanomaterials of arbitrary dimensionality, ranging from nanoparticles over nanotubes, nanowires, and ultrathin films to nanostructured lattices, focusing on solution chemistry mechanistic aspects. The synthesis defined nanostructures serves as overarching perspective, which enriched by drawing connections insights related fields. Strategies controlling size, shape, crystallinity, porosity, composition, arrangement electrolessly plated are outlined, including templating (which harnesses method's exceptional conformality guide limit deposit formation), complementary approach selective growth, tailored seeding, bath design. Being able strike convincing compromises between material quality ease preparation, electroless nanoplating has distinct potential facilitate application metal nanomaterials.