Nanoclusters with extra stability at certain cluster sizes are known as magic clusters with exotic properties. The classic Wulff construction principle, which stipulates that the preferred structure of a cluster should minimize its total surface energy, is often invoked in determining the cluster magicity, resulting in close-shelled Mackay icosahedronal clusters with odd-numbered magic sizes of 13, 55, 147, etc. Here we use transition metal clusters around size 55 as prototypical examples to demonstrate that, in the nanometer regime, the classic Wulff construction principle needs to be generalized to primarily emphasize the edge atom effect instead of the surface energy. Specifically, our detailed calculations show that nanoclusters with much shorter total edge lengths but substantially enlarged total surface areas are energetically much more stable. As a consequence, a large majority of the nanoclusters within the 3d-, 4d-, and 5d-transition metal series are found to be fcc or hcp crystal fragments with much lower edge energies, and the widely perceived magic size of 55 is shifted to its nearby even numbers.
A washable textile-structured single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerators (TS-TENG) was successful developed. A stained TS-TENG can be easily and quickly cleaned by washing in water. When sewed on clothes, it can effectively harvest biomechanical energy from human motions.
Catalysis using gold nanoparticles supported on oxides has been under extensive investigation for many important application processes. However, how to tune the charge state of a given Au species to perform a specific chemical reaction, e.g. CO oxidation, remains elusive. Here, using first-principles calculations, we show clearly that an intrinsically inert Au anion deposited on oxygen-deficient TiO 2 (110) (Au@TiO 2 (110)) can be tuned and optimized into a highly effective single atom catalyst (SAC), due to the depletion of the d-orbital by substrate doping. Particularly, Ni-and Cu-doped Au@TiO 2 complexes undergo a reconstruction driven by one of the two dissociated O atoms upon CO oxidation. The remaining O atom heals the surface oxygen vacancy and results in a stable bow-shaped surface "O-Au-O" species; thereby the highly oxidized Au single atom now exhibits magnetism and dramatically enhanced activity and stability for O 2 activation and CO oxidation, due to the emergence of high density of states near the Fermi level. Based on further extensive calculations, we establish the "charge selection rule" for O 2 activation and CO oxidation on Au: the positively charged Au SAC is more active than its negatively charged counterpart for O 2 activation, and the more positively charged the Au, the more active it is.
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