Linear metal nanostructures and size effects of supported metal catalysts

Nickel metal catalysts composed of nanometer by micrometer strips have been produced with solid-state microfabrication techniques. The strips are actually the edges of nickelcatalyst thin films, which are sandwiched between separating support layers, which are also nanometers thick. These linear nanostructures constitute well-defined and well-controlled catalytic entities that reproduce the size of traditional supported metal clusters in one dimension, thus separating size from total number of atoms in the catalyst. Examination of their catalytic activity showed that they duplicate the behavior of conventional supported clusters. A specific rate maximum was observed for the hydrogenolysis of ethane at a nanoscale dimension similar to the cluster size at which the rate is maximum in the case of the supported cluster studies, whereas the hydrogenation of ethylene shows no such size dependency. The results suggest that the surface-to-volume ratio or the number of atoms in the catalytic entity cannot be the source of these size effects and that either support effects or nonequilibrium surface structures are the determining factors.