Kinetics-induced orientational morphological evolution of Pd-Sb rhombohedra from regular nanocrystals to distorted ones

Although distorted crystals are ubiquitous in nature, the artificial creation of distorted nanoscale crystals with tailored morphology and structure are greatly challenging, since the formation of ideal nanocrystals requires extremely rigorous condition. We herein demonstrate a kinetics-induced orientational morphological evolution of distorted Pd 20 Sb 7 rhombohedral nanocrystals (RNCs) by altering the temperature for growth. Detailed characterizations and experiments show that the retarded kinetics leads to the morphological evolution from regular rhombohedron to distorted rhombohedron, while the crystalline structure is kept identical by exposing six {211} facets. Moreover, the morphological evolution of distorted Pd 20 Sb 7 RNCs is further validated by the similar normalized activity towards formic oxidation reaction based on the surface Pd atoms. This work advances the precisely controlled synthesis of Pd-based nanocrystals with tailored morphologies, which may attract great interests in various fields including chemistry, materials science, catalysis and beyond.