Electron tomography and 3D molecular simulations of platinum nanocrystals.
This work reports on the morphology of individual platinum nanocrystals with sizes of about 5 nm. By using the electron tomography technique that gives 3D spatial selectivity, access to quantitative information in the real space was obtained. The morphology of individual nanoparticles was characterized using HAADF-STEM tomography and it was shown to be close to a truncated octahedron. Using molecular dynamics simulations, this geometrical shape was found to be the one minimizing the nanocrystal energy. Starting from the tomographic reconstruction, 3D crystallographic representations of the studied Pt nanocrystals were obtained at the nanometer scale, allowing the quantification of the relative amount of the crystallographic facets present on the particle surface.
Institut de Physique et Chimie des Matériaux de Strasbourg, UMR 7504 CNRS-UdS, 23 rue du Loess BP43, 67034 Strasbourg cedex 2, France.
Ileana
I
Florea
Arnaud
A
Demortière
Christophe
C
Petit
Hervé
H
Bulou
Charles
C
Hirlimann
Ovidiu
O
Ersen