Assembly of shape-controlled nanocrystals by depletion attraction

Recently (Baranov et al., Nano Lett., 2010, 10, 743) we demonstrated that depletion attraction between semiconductor nanorods in solution can be employed for both their self-assembly and their separation from spherical nanoparticles. Here we show that depletion attraction can be used to fabricate binary superlattices of nanorods and 3D networks of octapod/tetrapod-shaped nanocrystals.