Chirality and electronic structure of the thiolate-protected Au38 nanocluster.
Structural, electronic, and optical properties of the thiolate-protected Au(38)(SR)(24) cluster are studied by density-functional theory computations (R = CH(3) and R = C(6)H(13)) and by powder X-ray crystallography (R = C(12)H(25)). A low-energy structure which can be written as Au(23)@(Au(SR)(2))(3)(Au(2)(SR)(3))(6) having a bi-icosahedral core and a chiral arrangement of the protecting gold-thiolate Au(x)(SR)(y) units yields an excellent match between the computed (for R = C(6)H(13)) and measured (for R = C(12)H(25)) powder X-ray diffraction function. We interpret in detail the electronic structure of the Au(23) core by using a particle-in-a-cylinder model. Although the alkane thiolate l…
Electron microscopy of gold nanoparticles at atomic resolution
Detailed structure of a gold nanoparticle Adding only a few atoms or changing the capping ligand can dramatically change the structure of individual metal nanoparticles. Azubel et al. used aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy to derive a three-dimensional reconstruction of water-soluble gold nanoparticles. Small-angle x-ray scattering and other techniques have also corroborated this model. They used this to determine the atomic structure, which compared favorably with density functional theory calculations, without assuming any a priori structural knowledge or the use of model fitting. Science , this issue p. 909