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  • Phuong Hoang

Beautiful icosahedral symmetry nanostructures

Updated: Oct 7, 2019


An origami of an icosahedral star

Below is the image of the place where I used to sit and drink coffee with my friends in front of the library. There are these amazing stellated structures.


Donna Marcus’ Delphinus constellation sculptures






These stars structures not only serve aesthetic purpose but also a solution to solve many existing industrial and scientific problems.


From my favorite coffee place to my origami folding hobby to my research

There are many ways to make star structure.

A perk of being a graduate student is having access to special tools. I can make (synthesize) a star so small that folding an origami structure at this size is an impossible task.


Below is image of an icosahedron origami I made, which took me less time than the nanostar origami. To make a star structure at nanoscale, seed-mediated method was used to transform from a smaller icosahedral nanoparticle (seed), which can only be "seen" with a transmission electron microscope (TEM).


An origami of an icosahedron

TEM image of an icosahedral gold nanoparticle

TEM image of a nanostar

From everyday decorations to practical solution

These nanostructures are highly symmetrical, which provide more uniform plasmonic coupling and enhancement of the intrinsic Raman signal.

Direct application of these plasmonic structures was reported in one of my research work (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smtd.201900611).

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