Interactions of sub-five-nanometer diameter colloidal palladium nanoparticles in solution investigated via liquid cell transmission electron microscopy

Haifeng Wang; Xiaoqin Zhou; Yunhui Huang; Xin Chen; Chuanhong Jin

doi:10.1039/d0ra05759b

Interactions of sub-five-nanometer diameter colloidal palladium nanoparticles in solution investigated via liquid cell transmission electron microscopy

RSC Adv. 2020 Sep 21;10(57):34781-34787. doi: 10.1039/d0ra05759b. eCollection 2020 Sep 16.

Authors

Haifeng Wang^{1

2}, Xiaoqin Zhou^{2

3}, Yunhui Huang¹, Xin Chen³, Chuanhong Jin^{2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of New Energy for Vehicles, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University Shanghai 201804 China huangyh@tongji.edu.cn.
² State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University Hangzhou Zhejiang 310027 China chhjin@zju.edu.cn.
³ Key Laboratory for Ultrafine Materials of Ministry of Education, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced Polymeric Materials, School of Materials Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology Shanghai 200237 P. R. China xinchen73@ecust.edu.cn.
⁴ Hunan Institute of Advanced Sensing and Information Technology, Xiangtan University Xiangtan Hunan 411105 China.

Abstract

Inter-particle interactions play important roles in controlling the structures, dispersion state and chemo-physical properties of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) in liquid media. In this work, we prepared palladium (Pd) NPs with an average diameter of ∼4.6 nm in situ inside the liquid cell, and investigated their coupled diffusion and aggregation behaviors through liquid cell transmission electron microscopy (LCTEM). Via analyzing the interaction energies and forces, we derived the effective working range for repulsive double layer interaction experimentally, a value larger than two times the Debye length, suggesting a different interaction behavior of sub-5 nm NPs from that of colloidal NPs in larger sizes. Our results provide insights for the interactions between colloidal ultrafine nanoparticles in solution and will also shed light on the precisely controlled assembly of colloidal nanocrystals for practical applications.