Tailoring the local/atomic structure and electronic properties of nanoparticles: from fundamental studies to potential applications in catalysis and biotechnology

拟议的研究属于快速增长的纳米科学和纳米技术领域，并围绕金属纳米颗粒(NPs)的研究展开，NPs是纳米技术的基本组成部分。在过去的二十年里，金属纳米颗粒(NPs)的研究取得了爆炸性的增长，在生物传感、纳米电子学、药物输送和催化等纳米技术领域显示出广阔的应用前景。为了提高金属纳米粒子在实际应用中的性能，通常选择具有良好原子结构的双金属和三金属纳米粒子，如核-壳、合金和核-合金壳。这些多组分纳米粒子可以结合许多与纳米粒子中每一组分相关联的期望功能，例如高催化反应性、磁各向异性、生物相容性等。尽管有这些优点，但合成和表征具有良好原子结构和电子性质的多组分金属纳米粒子仍然是一个重要的挑战。为此，拟议的研究旨在通过开发有效的合成方法来提高在原子水平上精确控制多组分金属纳米粒子的结构和电子性质的能力，并通过强大的X射线光谱技术提供对其结构-性质关系的洞察。将特别重视含有至少一种磁性金属(如Fe、Co、Ni)的超顺磁性纳米粒子的研究。这些基础研究将与探索纳米粒子在催化和生物技术中的一些创新应用相结合。

The proposed research falls into the rapidly growing area of nanoscience and nanotechnology and centers around the studies of metal nanoparticles (NPs), the fundamental building blocks of nanotechnology. The past two decades have witnessed a explosive growth of research in metal nanoparticles (NPs), which show promising applications in a variety of areas in nanotechnology such as biosensing, nanoelectronics, drug delivery and catalysis. In order to improve the performance of metal NPs in practical applications, selection of bimetallic and trimetallic NPs with well-tailored atomic structures, such as core-shell, alloy and core-alloyed shell, is often preferred. These multicomponent NPs may combine many desired functionalities associated with each component in the NPs, such as high catalytic reactivity, magnetic anisotropy, biocompatability and so on. In spite of these advantages, it remains an important challenge to synthesize and characterize multicomponent metal NPs with well-tailored atomic structure and electronic properties. Towards this end, the proposed research is intended to improve the ability of precise control of the structure and electronic properties of multi-component metal NPs at atomic level by developing efficient synthetic methodology for the NPs and by providing insights into their structure-property relationship with powerful X-ray spectroscopy techniques. Particular emphasis will be placed in the studies of superparamagnetic NPs containing at least one magnetic metal (e.g. Fe, Co, Ni). These fundamental studies will be carried out in conjunction with the exploration of some innovative applications of the NPs in catalysis and biotechnology.