Preparation and Catalytic Activity for Aerobic Glucose Oxidation of Crown Jewel Structured Pt/Au Bimetallic Nanoclusters

Understanding of the “structure-activity” relations for catalysts at an atomic level has been regarded as one of the most important objectives in catalysis studies. Bimetallic nanoclusters (NCs) in its many types, such as core/shell, random alloy, cluster-in-cluster, bi-hemisphere and crown jewel (one kind of atom locating at the top position of another kind of NC), attract significant attention owing to their excellent optical, electronic and catalytic properties. PVP-protected crown jewel-structured Pt/Au (CJ-Pt/Au) bimetallic nanoclusters (BNCs) with Au atoms located at active top sites were synthesized via a replacement reaction using 1.4-nm Pt NCs as mother clusters even considering the fact that the replacement reaction between Pt and Au3+ ions is difficult to be occurred. The prepared CJ-Pt/Au colloidal catalysts characterized by UV-Vis, TEM, HR-TEM and HAADF-STEM-EELS showed a high catalytic activity for aerobic glucose oxidation and the top Au atoms decorating the Pt NCs were about 15 times more active than the Au atoms of Au NCs with similar particle size.