Controlled synthesis of silver nanostructures stabilized by fluorescent polyarylene ether nitrile

Abstract In this work, the intrinsically fluorescent polyarylene ether nitrile (PEN) was explored to realize the controlled synthesis of fluorescent silver nanostructures with different morphology for the first time. Specifically, it was found that silver nitrate (AgNO 3 ) can be effectively reduced to silver nanoparticles using PEN as both reducing and surface capping agents in N, N -dimethylformamide (DMF). More interestingly, the morphology of obtained fluorescent silver nanostructures can be tuned from nanospheres to nanorods by simple variation of reaction time at 130 °C using a relative PEN:AgNO 3 molar concentration ratio of 1:8. Meanwhile, the obtained Ag nanostructures exhibited both localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) band and fluorescent emission around 420 nm, which would find potential applications in biochemical sensing and optical devices fields.