CTAB-stabilized gold nanoparticles were synthesized by applying the seeding-growth approach in order to gain information about the size dependence of the catalytic reduction of p-nitrophenol to p-aminophenol with sodium borohydride. Five different colloidal solutions of stabilized gold nanoparticles have been characterized by TEM, AFM, UV-Vis, SAXS, and DLS for their particle size distributions. Gold nanoparticles (mean sizes: 3.5, 10, 13, 28, 56 nm diameter) were tested for their catalytic efficiency. Kinetic data were acquired by UV-Vis spectroscopy at different temperatures between 25 and 45 °C. By studying the p-nitrophenol to p-aminophenol reaction kinetics we determined the nanoparticle size which is needed to gain the fastest conversion under ambient conditions in the liquid phase. Unexpectedly, CTAB-stabilized gold nanoparticles with a diameter of 13 nm are most efficient.

Realization of graphene moiré superstructures on the surface of 4d and 5d transition metals offers templates with periodically modulated electron density, which is responsible for a number of fascinating effects, including the formation of quantum dots and the site selective adsorption of organic molecules or metal clusters on graphene. Here, applying the combination of scanning probe microscopy/spectroscopy and the density functional theory calculations, we gain a profound insight into the electronic and topographic contributions to the imaging contrast of the epitaxial graphene/Ir(111) system. We show directly that in STM imaging the electronic contribution is prevailing compared to the topographic one. In the force microscopy and spectroscopy experiments we observe a variation of the interaction strength between the tip and high-symmetry places within the graphene moiré supercell, which determine the adsorption sites for molecules or metal clusters on graphene/Ir(111).

We have studied the Metal-Insulator like Transition (MIT) in lithium and beryllium ring-shaped clusters through ab initio Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) method. Performing accurate calculations for different interatomic distances and using Quantum Information Theory (QIT) we investigated the changes occurring in the wavefunction between a metallic-like state and an insulating state built from free atoms. We also discuss entanglement and relevant excitations among the molecular orbitals in the Li and Be rings and show that the transition bond length can be detected using orbital entropy functions. Also, the effect of different orbital basis on the effectiveness of the DMRG procedure is analyzed comparing the convergence behavior.

The dynamical fluctuations in approaches such as dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) allow for the self-consistent optimization of a local fragment, hybridized with a true correlated environment. We show that these correlated environmental fluctuations can instead be efficiently captured in a wave function perspective in a computationally cheap, frequency-independent, zero-temperature approach. This allows for a systematically improvable, short-time wave function analogue to DMFT, which entails a number of computational and numerical benefits. We demonstrate this approach to solve the correlated dynamics of the paradigmatic Bethe lattice Hubbard model, as well as detailing cluster extensions in the one-dimensional Hubbard chain where we clearly show the benefits of this rapidly convergent description of correlated environmental fluctuations. arXiv:1808.09321v4 [cond-mat.str-el]

We present a multi-scale approach to efficiently embed an ab initio correlated chemical fragment described by its energy-weighted density matrices, and entangled with a wider mean-field many-electron system. This approach, first presented in Phys. Rev. B, 98, 235132 (2018), is here extended to account for realistic long-range interactions and broken symmetry states. The scheme allows for a systematically improvable description in the range of correlated fluctuations out of the fragment into the system, via a self-consistent optimization of a coupled auxiliary mean-field system. It is discussed that the method has rigorous limits equivalent to existing quantum embedding approaches of both dynamical mean-field theory, as well as density matrix embedding theory, to which this method is compared, and the importance of these correlated fluctuations is demonstrated. We derive a self-consistent local energy functional within the scheme, and demonstrate the approach for Hydrogen rings, where quantitative accuracy is achieved despite only a single atom being explicitly treated. arXiv:1904.08019v2 [cond-mat.str-el]