The ability to precisely control nanocrystal (NC) shape and composition is useful in many fields, including catalysis and plasmonics. Seed-mediated strategies have proven effective for preparing a wide variety of structures, but a poor understanding of how to selectively grow corners, edges, and facets has limited the development of a general strategy to control structure evolution. Here, we report a universal synthetic strategy for directing the site-specific growth of anisotropic seeds to prepare a library of designer nanostructures. This strategy leverages nucleation energy barrier profiles and the chemical potential of the growth solution to control the site-specific growth of NCs into exotic shapes and compositions. This strategy can be used to not only control where growth occurs on anisotropic seeds but also control the exposed facets of the newly grown regions. NCs of many shapes are synthesized, including over 10 here-to-fore never reported NCs and, in principle, many others are possible.

精确控制纳米晶体（NC）形状和成分的能力在许多领域中都非常有用，包括催化和等离激元。种子介导的策略已被证明可以有效地制备各种各样的结构，但是对如何有选择地生长角，边和小面的了解甚少，限制了控制结构演化的一般策略的发展。在这里，我们报告了一种通用的合成策略，用于指导各向异性种子的特定于位点的生长，以制备设计师纳米结构的文库。该策略利用成核能垒曲线和生长溶液的化学势来控制NC的特定位置生长成奇特的形状和成分。该策略不仅可以用于控制各向异性种子上的生长，还可以控制新生长区域的裸露面。合成了多种形状的NC，包括迄今从未报告过的10多种NC，原则上还有许多其他的NC。