Some recent advances in gold-based catalysis facilitated by aberration corrected analytical electron microscopy

The recent availability of aberration corrected analytical electron microscopes (ACAEM) is revolutionizing our ability to characterize nanostructured catalyst materials. Some recent case studies are presented whereby the application of the high angle annular dark field (HAADF) imaging technique, coupled with STEM-XEDS analysis, has given us a more detailed and realistic view of the catalyst morphology. The examples chosen include supported Au catalysts for low temperature CO oxidation and supported AuPd bimetallic alloy catalysts for the direct production of H2O2

DFT study on size-dependent geometries, stabilities, and electronic properties of AunM2 (M = Si, P; n = 1–8) clusters

The ab initio method based on density functional theory at the PW91PW91 level has been employed to systematically study the structures, stabilities, electronic, and magnetic properties of gold clusters with or without silicon/phosphorus doping. The optimized geometries show that the most stable isomers for AunSi2 and AunP2 (n = 1–8) clusters prefer a three-dimensional structure when n = 2 and n = 3 upwards, respectively, and they can be viewed as grown from the already observed Aun−1M2 (M = Si, P). The relative stabilities of calculated AunM2 (M = Si, P) clusters have been analyzed through the atomic average binding energy, fragmentation energy, second-order difference of energy, and HOMO-LUMO gap. A pronounced odd-even alternative phenomenon indicates that the clusters with even-numbered valence electrons possess a higher stability than their neighboring ones. For both systems, natural population analysis reveals that electronic properties of dopant atoms in the corresponding configuration are mainly related to s and p states. We also investigated magnetic effects of clusters as a function of cluster size, however, their oscillatory magnetic moments were found to vary inversely to the fragmentation energy, second-order difference of energy, and HOMO-LUMO gap