Fabrication and Synthesis of Noble Metal Nanoparticle Arrays for Single Particle Catalysis

Single particle plasmonic nanospectroscopy is a powerful and at the same time relatively easy-to-implement research method that allows monitoring of changes in the structure and properties of substrate-immobilized metal nanoparticles in real time and in situ conditions with only few restrictions in terms of surrounding medium, temperature and pressure.

In the context of single particle catalysis, it has been successful used to study the impact of particle size and structure in catalytic processes on single nanoparticles. However, all the studies carried out so far have used lithographically-defined polycrystalline disk-like nanoparticles.

In other words, thermodynamic and kinetic investigations on shape-selected single-crystal nanoparticles with well-defined architectures are completely lacking because none of the lithographic techniques uses to fabricate supported nanoparticles have the morphological control achieved in colloidal synthesis.

Therefore, the aim of this project is to develop novel methodologies for achieving the fabrication/synthesis of shape-selected nanoparticle arrays on surfaces compatible with a plasmonic nanospectroscopy platform to apply it in the quest of deriving catalytic structure-function correlations at the single nanoparticle level.

Assessing the state, activity, and selectivity of individual nanoparticles at atomic level has significant potential to contribute to the development of more efficient nanomaterials.