Recent advances in facile synthesis of bimetallic nanostructures: An overview

Abstract

Nobel metal nanomaterials with interesting physical and chemical properties are ideal building blocks for engineering and tailoring nanoscale structures for specific technological applications. Bimetallic nanomaterials consisting of magnetic metals and noble metals have attracted much interest for their promising potentials in many fields including magnetic sensors, catalysts, optical detection, and biomedical applications. Particularly, effective control of the size, shape, architecture, and compositional microstructure of metal nanomaterials plays an important role in enhancing their functionality and application potentials, for example, in fuel cells, optical and biomedical sensing. This paper focuses on recent advances in controllable synthesis of bimetallic nanostructured materials. Recent contributions in controllable synthesis of bimetallic nanomaterials with different architectures including nanoparticles, nanowires, nanosheets, or nanotubes and their assemblies are presented in this paper. A wide range of facile synthesis methods are covered herein with high emphasis on wet chemical methods owing to their facility of use, efficacy, and smaller environmental footprint.