A general approach toward polymer-coated plasmonic nanostructures

We report a generic method for the preparation of polymercoated plasmonic nanostructures with tunable thickness of the hydrophobic polymer spacer. By simply changing the order of addition of a block copolymer and water, encapsulation of either individual or assembled nanoparticles within copolymer micelles can be selected, thus providing wide versatility to the method.