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Surface Structural Symmetry Breaking of Highly Symmetrical Ag29 Nanoclusters
Wenqiang Duan1, Chen Zhu1, Xi Kang1
1Department of Chemistry and Centre for Atomic Engineering of Advanced Materials, Key Laboratory of Structure and Functional Regulation of Hybrid Materials of Ministry of Education, Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Chemistry for Inorganic/Organic Hybrid Functionalized Materials, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, Anhui, China.
Abstract:
An in-depth understanding of the structural symmetry of nanoclusters benefits the investigation of structure-property correlations. In this study, we accomplished the symmetry breaking of the surface structures of a highly symmetrical Ag29 nanocluster. The Ag29 nanocluster exhibited a highly C3 axisymmetry, while this nanocluster underwent structural symmetry breaking in the presence of large-sized counterions as an asymmetric factor, giving rise to an Ag28 nanocluster with a bare surface and a C1 symmetric overall structure. Despite both the Ag29 and Ag28 nanoclusters exhibiting comparably electronic structures, the highly symmetrical Ag29 nanocluster displayed a significantly higher photoluminescence intensity compared to the asymmetrical Ag28 nanocluster, which has been rationalized from the perspective of their structures and symmetry. Overall, this study presents a novel silver cluster pair with controllably symmetrical or asymmetrical surface structures, allowing for an atomic-level understanding of how structural symmetry influences the photoluminescence of metal nanoclusters.
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