How the Surface Structure Determines the Properties of CuH

Elliot Bennett, Thomas Wilson, Patrick Murphy, Keith Refson, Alex Hannon, Sylvia Imberti, Samantha Callear, Gregory Chass, Stewart Parker

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

CuH is a material that appears in a wide diversity of circumstances ranging from catalysis to electro- chemistry to organic synthesis. There are both aqueous and nonaqueous synthetic routes to CuH, each of which apparently leads to a different product. We developed synthetic methodologies that enable multigram quantities of CuH to be produced by both routes and characterized each product by a combination of spectroscopic, diffraction and computational methods. The results show that, while all methods for the synthesis of CuH result in the same bulk product, the synthetic path taken engenders differing surface properties. The different behaviors of CuH obtained by aqueous and nonaqueous routes can be ascribed to a combination of very different particle size and dissimilar surface termination, namely, bonded hydroxyls for the aqueous routes and a coordinated donor for the nonaqueous routes. This work provides a particularly clear example of how the nature of an adsorbed layer on a nanoparticle surface determines the properties.
Original languageEnglish
Article number5
Pages (from-to)2213-2220
Number of pages8
JournalInorganic Chemistry
Volume54
Early online date11 Feb 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Mar 2015

Cite this