{"id":32853,"date":"2016-12-21T19:50:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T03:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-perfect-christmas-gift-a-nanoscale-snowman"},"modified":"2017-04-24T19:10:32","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T02:10:32","slug":"the-perfect-christmas-gift-a-nanoscale-snowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-perfect-christmas-gift-a-nanoscale-snowman","title":{"rendered":"The perfect Christmas gift? A nanoscale snowman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-perfect-christmas-gift-a-nanoscale-snowman.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Happy Holidays; happy end of the year, happy launch of next year, happy snow days, happy hot chocolate day, etc. Nonetheless, my gift to you this year is a Nanoscale Snowman.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Would a jewel-encrusted snowman make the perfect Christmas present? At only 5 nanometres in size, the price might be lower than you think. And it\u2019s functional too, catalysing the splitting of water to make green hydrogen for fuel cells.<\/p>\n<p>The nanoparticle, as imaged with the aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopes, features eyes, nose and mouth of precious-metal platinum clusters embedded in a titanium dioxide face. Each platinum cluster typically contains 30 platinum atoms; within the whole nanoparticle there are approximately 1680 <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/titanium+atoms\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">titanium atoms<\/a> and 180 platinum atoms.<\/p>\n<p>The nano-snowman formed spontaneously from a self-assembled platinum-titanium nanoparticle which was oxidised in air, drawing the titanium atoms out to the surface. The self-assembly occurred in a gas phase, cluster beam condensation source, before size-selection with a <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/mass\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">mass<\/a> spectrometer and deposition onto a carbon surface for oxidation and then imaging. The mass of the snowman was 120,000 atomic mass units. Compared with a more conventional pure platinum catalyst particle, the inclusion of the titanium atoms offers two potential benefits: dilution of how much precious platinum is needed to perform the catalysis, and protection of the <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/platinum\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">platinum<\/a> cores against sintering (i.e. aggregation of the nanoparticles). The shell is porous enough to allow hydrogen through and the particles are functional in the <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/hydrogen\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">hydrogen<\/a> evolution reaction.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2015-12-christmas-gift-nanoscale-snowman.html#nRlv\">http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2015&#45;12-christmas-gift-nanoscale-snowman.html#nRlv<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy Holidays; happy end of the year, happy launch of next year, happy snow days, happy hot chocolate day, etc. Nonetheless, my gift to you this year is a Nanoscale Snowman. Would a jewel-encrusted snowman make the perfect Christmas present? At only 5 nanometres in size, the price might be lower than you think. And [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,1506,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-food","category-nanotechnology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32853"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49437,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32853\/revisions\/49437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}