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We report a comprehensive study of aqueous halide adsorption on nanoparticles of gold and palladium that addresses several limitations hampering the use of atomistic modeling as a tool for understanding and improving wet-chemical synthesis and related applications. A combination of thermodynamic modeling with density functional theory (DFT) calculations and experimental data is used to predict equilibrium shapes of halide-covered nanoparticles as a function of the chemical environment. To ensure realistic and experimentally relevant results, we account for solvent effects and include a large set of vicinal surfaces, several adsorbate coverages as well as decahedral particles. While the observed stabilization is not significant enough to result in thermodynamic stability of anisotropic shapes such as nanocubes, non-uniformity in the halide coverage indicates the possibility of obtaining such shapes as kinetic products. With regard to technical challenges, we show that inclusion of surface-solvent interactions lead to qualitative changes in the predicted shape. Furthermore, accounting for non-local interactions on the functional level yields a more accurate description of surface systems., 10 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

Alkanethiolate monolayers on gold are important both for applications in nanoscience as well as fundamental studies of adsorption and self-assembly at metal surfaces. While considerable experimental effort has been put into understanding the phase diagram of these systems, theoretical work based on density functional theory (DFT) has long been hampered by the inability of conventional exchange-correlation functionals to describe dispersive interactions. In this work, we combine dispersion-corrected DFT calculations using the new vdW-DF-CX functional with the ab initio thermodynamics method to study the stability of dense standing-up and low-coverage lying-down phases on Au(111). We demonstrate that the lying-down phase has a thermodynamic region of stability starting from thiolates with alkyl chains consisting of n ? 3 methylene units. This phase emerges as a consequence of a competition between dispersive chain-chain and chain-substrate interactions, where the strength of the latter varies more strongly with n. A phase diagram is derived under ultrahigh-vacuum conditions, detailing the phase transition temperatures of the system as a function of the chain length. The present work illustrates that accurate ab initio modeling of dispersive interactions is both feasible and essential for describing self-assembled monolayers.

While it is well established that elevated temperatures can induce surface roughening of metal surfaces, the effect of a high electric field on the atomic structure at ambient temperature has not been investigated in detail. Here we show with atomic resolution using in situ transmission electron microscopy how intense electric fields induce reversible switching between perfect crystalline and disordered phases of gold surfaces at room temperature. Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations reveal that the mechanism behind the structural change can be attributed to a vanishing energy cost in forming surface defects in high electric fields. Our results demonstrate how surface processes can be directly controlled at the atomic scale by an externally applied electric field, which promotes an effective decoupling of the topmost surface layers from the underlying bulk. This opens up opportunities for development of active nanodevices in e.g. nanophotonics and field-effect transistor technology as well as fundamental research in materials characterization and of yet unexplored dynamically-controlled low-dimensional phases of matter., Comment: The manuscript is 10 pages long and the supplemental material is 15 pages. There are six supplemental movies that can be provided upon request to LDK