TEM Images of My Gold Nanoparticles

I finally got some HRTEM images of my gold nanoparticles done yesterday and picked up the data today. They look pretty good. The first sample we looked at was my 4-methylbenzenethiol gold nanoparticles as dipped from a water surface at about 25 mN/m. Unfortunately the carbon film was all broken up and so the images were not as good as they could have been. Still managed to get size data on them as well as seeing how well packed they were. A small snapshot of a single nanoparticle (about 3 nm across) is shown below. You can even make out the interference fringes from the lattice spacing!

Got lots of images of the new hexanethiol coated gold nanoparticles too. They were smaller than we thought, and seem to be dominated by two sizes. The nanoparticles are clearly faceted with a good crystalline structure too. All great initial results, although I can’t wait to get more images of an LS film deposited onto a holey carbon grid when the carbon is intact.