ROLE OF «MAGIC» HCP NUMBERS IN STABILITY OF THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF Ag AND Ag NANOCLUSTERS

В настоящее время серебро активно применяется в микроэлектронике, в основном благодаря своей высокой электро- и теплопроводности. Учет процессов взаимодействия между металлом и световой волной (плазмонные эффекты) дает совершенно новые технические приложения серебра. Эти приложения становятся возможными благодаря сильному взаимодействию между падающим светом и свободными электронами в наноструктурах. К настоящему времени уже стало понятно, что размер, форма и структура наночастиц определяют их плазмонные свойства, в том числе резонансные частоты. Следовательно, подгонкой размера, внешнего вида металлической наноструктуры и ее внутреннего строения, можно управлять светом с очень большой степенью точности. В данной работе методом молекулярной динамики с использованием модифицированного потенциала сильной связи TB-SMA (second moment approximation of tight-binding) были изучены границы термической стабильности различной исходной структурной фазы в малых кластерах серебра с числом атомов, соответствующим «магическим» числам ГПУ структуры. Было показано, что характер термически индуцированных структурных переходов в исследуемых группах нанокластеров резко отличается. Данный факт может позволить создать малые кластеры серебра с требуемым внутренним строением. Currently, silver is actively used in microelectronics, mainly due to its high electrical and thermal conductivity. Taking into account the processes of interaction between a metal and a light wave (plasmon effects) gives completely new technical applications of silver. These applications are made possible by the strong interaction between incident light and free electrons in nanostructures. By now, it has already become clear that the size, shape, and structure of nanoparticles determine their plasmon properties, including resonance frequencies. Therefore, by adjusting the size, appearance of the metal nanostructure and its internal structure, it is possible to control light with a very high degree of accuracy. In this work, the boundaries of thermal stability of various initial structural phases in small silver clusters with the number of atoms corresponding to the «magic» numbers of the hcp structure were studied by the molecular dynamics method using the modified tight-binding potential TB-SMA (second moment approximation of tight-binding). It was shown that the nature of thermally induced structural transitions in the groups of nanoclusters under study differs sharply. This fact can make it possible to create small silver clusters with the required internal structure.

Design of carbon supports for metal-catalyzed acetylene hydrochlorination

For decades, carbons have been the support of choice in acetylene hydrochlorination, a key industrial process for polyvinyl chloride manufacture. However, no unequivocal design criteria could be established to date, due to the complex interplay between the carbon host and the metal nanostructure. Herein, we disentangle the roles of carbon in determining activity and stability of platinum-, ruthenium-, and gold-based hydrochlorination catalysts and derive descriptors for optimal host design, by systematically varying the porous properties and surface functionalization of carbon, while preserving the active metal sites. The acetylene adsorption capacity is identified as central activity descriptor, while the density of acidic oxygen sites determines the coking tendency and thus catalyst stability. With this understanding, a platinum single-atom catalyst is developed with stable catalytic performance under two-fold accelerated deactivation conditions compared to the state-of-the-art system, marking a step ahead towards sustainable PVC production.

Factors Affecting Surface Plasmon Coupling of Quantum Wells in Nitride-Based LEDs: A Review of the Recent Advances

Surface plasmon (SP)-enhanced quantum-well (QW) LEDs have proved their potential in replacing conventional lighting devices for their high-performance capabilities in ultraviolet (UV), blue and green spectral ranges. The SP-enhanced QW-LEDs have applications in light emission enhancement, light polarization, color conversion, and speed modulation. The electric field of the plasmonic mode of a metal couples with the exciton energy of QWs in resonance results in efficiency enhancement to several folds. The strength of the SP–QW coupling is mainly influenced by the type of metal used for SP enhancement, the metal nanostructure geometry, and the penetration depth of the SP fringing field in the p-GaN. The use of an appropriate dielectric interlayer between the metal and the p-GaN allows further control over SP resonance with QW emission wavelength. The penetration depth defines the p-GaN thickness and the QW period number for effective SP–QW coupling. The optimization of these parameters is key to achieve high efficiencies in SP-enhanced QW-LEDs for various applications. This review explains the SP enhancement mechanism and the key challenges facing the SP enhancement of QW-LEDs. The main factors that affect the SP–QW coupling have been explained in detail based on recent reports devoted to this field.

Plasmonic Chiral Metasurface Absorber Based on Bilayer Fourfold Twisted Semicircle Nanostructure at Optical Frequency

In this paper, we present a plasmonic chiral metasurface absorber (CMSA), which can achieve high selective absorption for right-handed and left-handed circular polarization (RCP, “+”, and LCP, “−”) lights at optical frequency. The CMSA is composed of a dielectric substrate sandwiched with bi-layer fourfold twisted semicircle metal nanostructure. The proposed CMSA has a strong selective absorption band, where absorption peaks for LCP and RCP lights occur at different resonance frequencies, reflecting the existence of a significant circular dichroism (CD) effect. It is shown that the absorbance of the CMSA can reach to 93.2% for LCP light and 91.6% for RCP light, and the maximum CD magnitude is up to 0.85 and 0.91 around 288.5 THz and 404 THz, respectively. The mechanism of the strong chiroptical response of the CMSA is illustrated by electric fields distributions of the unit-cell nanostructure. Furthermore, the influence of the geometry of the proposed CMSA on the circular polarization selective absorption characterization is studied systematically.

Synthesis of Pt-based alloy nanostructures

SYNOPSIS Optimizing the catalytic performance of multimetallic nanoparticle (NP) catalysts demands a concrete understanding of their design, while preferentially deploying wet chemical synthesis procedures to precisely control surface structural properties. Here we report the influence of reductants such as hydrogen-rich tetrabutylammonium borohydride (TBAB) and carbon monoxide-rich molybdenum carbonyl (Mo(CO)6) on the shape and morphological evolution of Pt-based binary (PtNi and PtCo) and ternary (PtNiAu and PtCoAu) nanostructures derived from a homogeneous solution of amine-based surface active agents (surfactants) in a high boiling point solvent. We successfully synthesized nanostructures exhibiting well-defined and composition-controlled surfaces deploying a one-pot synthetic approach. The development of the surface properties was, however, observed to be alloy-specific. The resultant highly monodisperse alloy NP with narrow size distributions and facet-oriented surfaces are expected to display enhanced functionality as catalysts for utilization in specific chemical reactions. Keywords: catalyst. platinum alloy, nanoparticles, synthesis, mixed-metal nanostructure.