Proceedings of nanoGe Fall Meeting 2021 (NFM21)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29363/nanoge.nfm.2021.258
Publication date: 23rd September 2021
Although nanostructures contain tenths of thousands of atoms, the atoms at the interfaces make most of the impact on the functionality, especially regarding the catalytic activity. It is therefore an important mission to control the formation of interfaces at the atomic scale, but that is easier said than done. First, it is hard to characterize and understand what was obtained in the synthesis. Then, relating the specific structures to the macroscopic properties requires overcoming issues of adequate sampling and statistics, reproducibility to the atomic scale features and abundance of similar structures within a synthetic batch. Last, there are confusing cases where we synthesize a certain structure to best of our knowledge and spontaneous rearrangements produce other active particles. Here, I will present a few such cases.