Congratulations to Dan Wang for her paper accepted by Journal of the American Chemical Society!
This article report that Pd nanocubes (NCs), which alone are not sufficiently plasmonically active as monomers, can act as a monometallic yet bifunctional platform with both catalytic and satisfactory plasmonic activity via controlled assembly into single dimers with an ∼1 nm gap, thereby enabling the in situ SERS monitoring of various important heterogeneously catalyzed reactions at the singledimer level. From a broader perspective, medium with single-particle ensitivity for monitoring of catalysis (Pd NC dimer) shifts the paradigm of the necessity of using a coinage metal (Cu, Au, Ag, Cu) in combination with a catalytically active transition metal. Our generic approach based on the dimer assembly for boosting the plasmonic activity can easily be transferred to other transitionmetal nanoparticles; it therefore complements other promising approaches to significantly broaden the applicability of SERS beyond coinage metals.
