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Gold nanorods were synthesized by the colloidal seed-mediated, surfactant-assisted approach Gou et al., Chem. Mater. 2005, 17, 3668-3672 using CTAB (hexadecylcetyltrimethylammonium bromide) obtained from ten different suppliers. The yield of gold nanorods depended strongly on the CTAB used: with the same recipe, three of the CTABs did not yield nanorods and produced only spherical gold particles, whereas the other CTABs yielded nanorods with nearly 100% yield. These results suggest that an impurity in the CTAB is very important for nanorod formation.
Smith et al. (Thu,) studied this question.