Overview
- A paper by Tulane researchers published in Physical Review Letters on 21 May reports that atoms on two common gold faces reorder into dense herringbone or hexagonal patterns that create an atomic-scale barrier to oxygen.
- The team used atomistic and electronic simulations to model oxygen encountering Au(110) and Au(100) surfaces and found reconstruction raises the energy needed for oxygen adsorption and dissociation.
- Reconstructed surfaces are calculated to suppress oxygen reactions by roughly a billion to a trillion times compared with unreconstructed, looser surface motifs, providing a quantitative explanation for gold’s long-term shine.
- The authors say this structural effect, not just weak chemical affinity for oxygen, explains bulk gold’s inertness and they propose that preventing or reversing reconstruction could let gold split oxygen and serve as an efficient catalyst.
- If borne out by experiments, the finding could offer an alternative to alloying or using nanoparticles for gold catalysis and may reshape how researchers design gold surfaces for industrial oxidation reactions.