Paracrystalline structure of gold, silver, palladium and platinum nanoparticles

Metallic nanoparticles are of great importance because of their unique physical, chemical, antimicrobial, diagnostic, therapeutic, biomedical, sensing, biosensing, catalytic and optical properties. Detailed knowledge of the atomic scale structure of these materials is essential for understanding their activities and for exploiting their potential. This paper reports structural studies of silica-supported silver, gold, palladium and platinum nanoparticles using X-ray diffraction and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Electron microscopy observation allowed the determination of nanoparticle sizes, which were estimated to be in the range of 45–470 Å, and their distribution. The obtained histograms exhibit a multimodal distribution of the investigated nanoparticle sizes. The X-ray diffraction data were analyzed using the Rietveld method in the form of Williamson–Hall plots, the PDFgui fitting procedure and model-based simulation. The Williamson–Hall plots provide evidence for the presence of strain in all investigated samples. The PDFgui fitting results indicate that the investigated nanoparticles consist of atomic clusters with different sizes and degrees of disorder as well as slightly different lattice parameters. The detailed structural characterization performed via model-based simulations proves that all samples exhibit a face-centered cubic type structure with paracrystalline distortion. The degree of disorder predicted by the paracrystalline theory is correlated with the sizes of the nanoparticles. The catalytic properties of the investigated noble metals are discussed in relation to their disordered structure.