Hexane-Driven Icosahedral to Cuboctahedral Structure Transformation of Gold Nanoclusters

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Yuanyuan Li ; Hao Cheng ; Tao Yao ; Zhihu Sun ; Wensheng Yan ; Yong Jiang ; Yi Xie ; Yongfu Sun ; Yuanyuan Huang ; Shoujie Liu ; Jing Zhang ; Yaning Xie ; Tiandou Hu ; Lina Yang ; Ziyu Wu ; Shiqiang Wei
• 刊名：The Journal of the American Chemical Society
• 出版年：2012
• 出版时间：October 31, 2012
• 年：2012
• 卷：134
• 期：43
• 页码：17997-18003
• 全文大小：456K
• 年卷期：v.134,no.43(October 31, 2012)
• ISSN：1520-5126

文摘

Whether and how nanoclusters possessing a rich diversity of possible geometric configurations can transform from one structural type to another are critical issues in cluster science. Here we demonstrate an icosahedral-to-cuboctahedral structural transformation of Au nanoclusters driven by changing the chemical environment. For icosahedral Au<sub>13sub> clusters protected by a mixture of dodecanethiol and triphenylphosphine ligands, solvent exchange of ethanol by hexane leads to quick selective desorption of the thiolate layers from the cluster surface. The surviving Au cores then undergo a much slower energy-minimization process via structural rearrangement, stabilized in the cuboctahedral structure and protected by triphenylphosphine in the hexane environment. In response to the dramatically changed atomic structure, the character of the electronic structure of the Au clusters is converted from semiconducting to metallic. This work addresses the structure鈥損roperty correlation and its strong dependence on the chemical environment for metal nanoclusters.