Younan Xia

Abstract: This article reports a facile synthesis of Pd-Cu bimetallic tripods with a purity over 90%. Two requirements must be met in order to form tripods: i) formation of triangular, plate-like seeds during the nucleation step and ii) preferential deposition of atoms onto the three corners of a seed during the growth step. In this synthesis, these requirements are fulfilled by adding CuCl2 and KBr into an aqueous synthesis. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the Cu atoms resulting from underpotential deposition could greatly reduce the energy barrier involved in the formation of triangular seeds with planar defects because of the much lower stacking fault energy (41 mJ·m−2 for Cu vs 220 mJ·m−2 for Pd). The Br− ions could strongly bind to the three {100} side faces of a triangular seed, forcing the Pd atoms to grow from the three corners of a seed to generate a tripod. When compared with commercial Pd black, the Pd-Cu tripods exhibited substantially enhanced catalytic activity toward the electro-oxidation of formic acid. This work offers a general strategy for the synthesis of nanocrystals with a tripod structure for catalytic applications.

TL;DR: This article describes a simple approach to anisotropic Au nanostructures with various shapes by reducing HAuCl 4 with poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP) in aqueous solutions without the use of any additional capping agent or reductant.

TL;DR: This research highlights the need to understand more fully the chiral stationary phase transition between Na6(CO3)(SO4) and Na3(SO4), which is important for the efficient and efficient design of materials for electronics.

TL;DR: A mechanistic study of the reaction revealed that the formation of Au nanoframes relies on the diffusion of both Au and Ag atoms, and the effect of the edge length and ridge thickness of the nan oframes on the localized surface plasmon resonance peak was explored.

TL;DR: This paper describes a facile method that generates dimers of Ag nanospheres by etching Ag nanocubes with Fe(NO3)3 in ethanol with the assistance of poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP), which allows for a systematic study of the hot-spot phenomenon in SERS.