Model catalysts of supported Au nanoparticles and mass-selected clusters.

In surface science, much effort has gone into obtaining a deeper understanding of the size-selectivity of nanocatalysts. In this article, electronic and chemical properties of various model catalysts consisting of Au are reported. Au supported by oxide surfaces becomes inert towards chemisorption and oxidation as the particle size became smaller than a critical size (2-3 nm). The inertness of these small Au nanoparticles is due to the electron-deficient nature of smaller Au nanoparticles, which is a result of metal-substrate charge transfer. Properties of Au clusters smaller than ∼20 atoms were shown to be non-scalable, i.e., every atom can drastically change the chemical properties of the clusters. Moreover, clusters with the same size can show dissimilar properties on various substrates. These recent endeavours show that the activity of a catalyst can be tuned by varying the substrate or by varying the cluster size on an atom-by-atom basis.