Polymer Templated Synthesis of AgCN and Ag Nanowires Thomas D. Lazzara, † Gilles R. Bourret, † R. Bruce Lennox,* and Theo G. M. van de Ven* Department of Chemistry and Centre for Self Assembled Chemical Structures, McGill UniVersity, 801 Sherbrooke Street W, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2K6 Canada ReceiVed September 12, 2008. ReVised Manuscript ReceiVed March 6, 2009 A template-based method for the fabrication of silver cyanide and polymer composite nanowires is described. Poly(styrene-alt-maleic anhydride) forms nanotubes in aqueous solution and acts as a template, guiding the growth of silver cyanide into long nanowires. The structures obtained can grow to several tens of micrometers in length and their diameter range from several to tens of nanometers. These AgCN nanowires can be reduced to metallic silver to form a high surface area Ag(0) nanowire array on a flexible nylon filter substrate. 1. Introduction Fabrication of one-dimensional metallic nanostructures is an important activity within nanoscience. Their ability to absorb and scatter light has led to numerous studies in plasmonics, 1-9 spectroscopy, 8-12 and biosensing. 13-16 The size-dependent electrical properties of nanostructures are particularly relevant to nanoscale electronics studies. 17,18 Some of these materials have demonstrated exceptional catalytic properties because of their high surface area. 19-24 Among the variety of nanomaterials available, silver nanostructures are especially important in the development of nanotechnology devices: silver is a low-cost and highly conductive metal, well-known for the intense and tunable optical response of its nanostructures. 4-8,11,25 These charac- teristics suggest that silver nanostructures can be significant candidates to use in nanotechnology applications. A variety of wet chemical, 25-32 template-based 33-37 tech- niques and physical vapor-phase syntheses 38 have been developed to fabricate silver nanowires and nanosized composite materials. Templating processes are versatile but can have clear disadvantages such as the need to dissolve the template. Thermolysis techniques 36 prevent formation of bare metallic structures on flexible organic substrates, whereas direct synthesis usually involves complex methods. 28,39 There are reports on the preparation of Ag(0) nanowire bundles from self-organized Ag(I) complexes 40,41 (silver thiolate and silver oxalate), but neither offers the possibility * Corresponding authors. E-mail: theo.vandeven@mcgill.ca; bruce.lennox@ mcgill.ca. † These authors equally contributed to this work. (1) Burda, C.; Chen, X.; Narayanan, R.; El-Sayed, M. A. Chem. ReV. 2005, 105, 1025. (2) Brongersma, M. L.; Hartman, J. W.; Atwater, H. A. Phys. ReV.B 2000, 62, R16356. (3) Dickson, R. M.; Lyon, L. A. J. Phys. Chem. 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