UC San Diego

Being able to apply in many different fields such as physical sciences, agriculture, and medical sciences, nanoparticles become one of the most popular science research materials with a scale of 1 nm to 100 nm. Many new technologies have been used to study the nanoparticles, including the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), which can image the molecules' surface at the atomic level. Although STM has been widely applied in imaging noble metal surfaces, the molecular-scale resolution is usually hard to achieve when imagining the nanoclusters synthesized in solution. Here, we use a low-temperature, Ultra-High Vacuum STM to image silver nanoparticles of different sizes deposited on Au-coated Si wafers, and examine the orientation and density of the ligands on the silver nanoparticles. Our study provides a molecular scale characterization of ligand-metal interaction.