1 3 Catal Lett DOI 10.1007/s10562-016-1921-4 Magnetically Recoverable Gold Nanorods as a Novel Catalyst for the Facile Reduction of Nitroarenes Under Aqueous Conditions Kamran Lamei 1  · Hossein Eshghi 1  · Mehdi Bakavoli 1  · Sadegh Rostamnia 2   Received: 16 September 2016 / Accepted: 13 November 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Graphical Abstract Keywords Gold nanorods · Cysteine-modiied Fe 3 O 4 @C · Ultrafast reduction of nitroarenes · Aqueous mild condition 1 Introduction The catalytic behavior of noble metal nanoparticles has been explored in various areas of organic synthesis [1, 2], including the reduction of nitroarenes [3], CO oxida- tion [4], etc [5]. The catalytic activity of noble metal NPs is mainly dependent on their size, shape, crystallin- ity, and the surface state since the potential binding sites at the surface of NPs affect the catalytic properties. The catalytic properties of Au [6, 7], Pt [8], Cu [9], Pd [10], and etc. NPs with a spherical shape have been studied. Among these noble metal NPs, Au NPs are the most studied stable metal NPs catalysis of organic reactions by supported gold nanoparticles [11–17]. Recently, the high-yielding synthesis of monodisperse gold nanorods has been developed, but only a few papers have reported on their applications. Gold nanorods (Au NRs) with dif- ferent aspect ratio (length/width) can absorb and scatter Abstract In this work, cysteine-functionalized Fe 3 O 4 @ Carbon magnetic nanoparticles were used for the synthe- sis of gold nanorods. Fe 3 O 4 @C nanoparticles were irst prepared by synthesis of Fe 3 O 4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs), and then carbon-coated MNPs (Fe 3 O 4 @C) were synthesized by glucose carbonization using a hydrother- mal method. Finally, the gold NRs were loaded on the modiied surface of Fe 3 O 4 @C MNPs. The designed mag- netically recoverable gold nanorods, after full characteri- zation by FTIR, SEM, TEM, TGA, VSM, XRD, and ICP- OES, were applied to the reduction of nitroarenes. The Fe 3 O 4 @C@Cys–Au nanorods showed higher performance than Fe 3 O 4 @C@Cys–Au nanospheres in a selective facile reduction of nitroarenes to the corresponding aminoarenes in aqueous medium at room temperature using NaBH 4 . Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10562-016-1921-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Hossein Eshghi heshghi@um.ac.ir 1 Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, 91775-1436 Mashhad, Iran 2 Organic and Nano Group (ONG), Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, University of Maragheh, Maragheh, Iran