A scanning tunneling microscopy study of the surface morphology of supported gold particles

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) was used to examine the surface structure of supported gold particles. STM images of annealed gold particles showed that particles larger than 150 Å have a polyhedral shape and a relatively smooth surface morphology. However, the surfaces of the particles smaller than 60 Å remained highly corrugated even after long annealing times. We believe that the difference in morphology of large and small particles may have some important implications for supported metal catalysis.