Icosahedral face-centered cubic Fe nanoparticles: facile synthesis and characterization with aberration-corrected TEM.
Iron nanoparticles are highly desirable for their potential applications in magnetic and catalytic industry. However, their shape-controlled fabrication is still an important challenge. Here we successfully synthesized icosahedral face-centered cubic (fcc) Fe nanoparticles with size of 5-13 nm by a specifically designed thermodynamic governed synthetic route, which is facile but highly efficient and reproducible. With the aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM), the unique icosahedral structure's pseudo-2-fold, 3-fold, and pseudo-5-fold axes were directly observed for the first time and verified by computer simulation, which reveals that nanoparticles' orientations have a large impact on HRTEM images at ultrahigh resolution. It is expected that as-synthesized Fe nanoparticles with sharp corners and edges would be beneficial for tailoring chemical and physical properties at the nanoscale.
Ling
Tao
T
Department of Chemical Engineering, The State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, Tsinghua University, Beijing National Center for Electron Microscopy, Beijing, China.
Xie
Lin
L
Zhu
Jing
J
Yu
Huimin
H
Ye
Hengqiang
H
Yu
Rong
R
Cheng
Zhiying
Z
Liu
Li
L
Liu
Li
L
Yang
Guangwen
G
Cheng
Zhida
Z
Wang
Yujia
Y
Ma
Xiuliang
X