Au₁₀₁–rGO nanocomposite: immobilization of phosphine-protected gold nanoclusters on reduced graphene oxide without aggregation

Abstract

A method is presented for the deposition of gold clusters onto reduced graphene oxide, without aggregation of the gold clusters.

A Review of State of the Art in Phosphine Ligated Gold Clusters and Application in Catalysis

“…[ 251e ] Further reports of XPS studies performed to examine the electronic structure of gold–phosphine clusters by different groups are available here. [ 28d,255a,b,252,258a,267 ]…”

“…Strategies to prevent aggregation such as the use of large surface areas, highly porous supports, creation of defects, ultralow gold loading and introduction of functionalized sites have been reported. [ 250,258b,406 ] Alotabi et al. recently demonstrated that deposition of a thin (1.1 nm) layer of Cr 2 O 3 onto Au 9 /TiO 2 inhibits agglomeration of gold clusters after ligand removal by heating.…”

Suppression of phosphine-protected Au9 cluster agglomeration on SrTiO3 particles using a chromium hydroxide layer

“…It should be noted that this is different to the binding energy of Cr 2 O 3 and will be discussed below (vide infra). P was difficult to analyse using STEM-EDX due to the intensity of P in EDX being significantly lower than that of Au and due to overlapping of the P K α and Au M α peaks 61 . In Figure 3A, the HAADF-STEM image shows small bright particles, which can be identified from the EDX mapping as Au features.…”

Methanol Tolerant Oxygen Reduction Reaction Electrocatalysis using Size‐Specific Triphenylphosphine‐Ligated Gold Nanoclusters

“…In recent decades, sub-2 nm sized gold nanoclusters and complexes (AuNCs) have been explored as promising electrocatalysts for ORR, [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), [25] hydrogenation of terminal alkynes into alkenes, [26] CO oxidation, [27] styrene oxidation [28,29] and benzyl alcohol oxidation. [30,31] The unusual catalytic behaviour of the AuNCs compared to bulk Au is due to a series of size-dependant properties, including high surface-to-volume ratio, [15,32,33] molecular-like electronic properties, [34] and ligand density (if present).…”

“…[39] In addition, aggregation of AuNCs is prevented due to the strong metal support interaction between rGO and metal clusters. [25] DFT calculations have suggested that hybridization of Au with graphene materials can result in a highly active and stable ORR electrocatalyst. [40,41] Therefore, there is an emerging interest to develop AuNCs-based nanocomposites using graphene-related materials.…”