Growth of PS beads on gold nanocrystals

Ohnuma et al. (Xia group at Washington U. St. Louis) presents a beautiful way of dressing up gold nanocrystals with polystyrene (PS) polymer. They start the polymerization and then introduce the gold (50 nm) nanocrystals at a magic time, 2 minutes after the initiation. 30 minutes had 50 % success for gold embedding and 0 minutes had multiple gold cores in PS particles (in all cases PS size was around 300 nm with somewhat round shape). I wonder if plasmonic resonance played a role in the growth of the PS. As they promised to publish a mechanistic paper, we'll have to wait.