Revealing the Distribution of the Atoms within Individual Bimetallic Catalyst Nanoparticles†
This work was funded by the Australian Research Council. We acknowledge the facilities, and the scientific and technical assistance, of the Australian Microscopy & Microanalysis Research Facility at the Australian Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis, The University of Sydney. T.M. thanks the ARC for a Future Fellowship. P.B. thanks the DFG for a research fellowship.
Abstract
To be able to correlate the catalytic properties of nanoparticles with their structure, detailed knowledge about their make-up on the atomic level is required. Herein, we demonstrate how atom-probe tomography (APT) can be used to quantitatively determine the three-dimensional distribution of atoms within a Au@Ag nanoparticle with near-atomic resolution. We reveal that the elements are not evenly distributed across the surface and that this distribution is related to the surface morphology and residues from the particle synthesis.
