Yellow spheres correspond to Au atoms, and in the chemically modified wires S, C, and H atoms are depicted by red, green, and blue spheres, respectively.
Marked distances are in units of .
This project is investigating the microscopic physical and chemical processes underlying the properties of novel materials. These results provide a new interpretation of the measured electron microscopy image of the atomic gold wire and suggest a new strategy for formation of organo-metallic nanowires, as well as the use of nanowires as monitoring and chemical sensing devices. We demonstrated the size dependence of the activity of nanoscale gold clusters, with Au 8 found to be the smallest size to catalyze the reaction. Small is different new and often unexpected behavior emerges when the physical size of the materials system is reduced to microscopic scale. H. Hakkinen, R. N. Barnett, and U. Landman, Atomic gold nanowires and their chemical modification, J. Phys.