Deposition and Characterization of Platinum and Palladium Nanoparticles on Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite

Nanostructured transition metal nanoparticles are of great interest from both fundamental and practical view points because of the quantum size effect, which is derived from the dramatic reduction of the number of free electrons. [Halperin, 1986; Schmid, 1994] Volokitin et al. have found that the quantum size effect strongly affected the thermodynamics of the metal nanoparticles. [Volokitin et al., 1996; Colvin et al., 1994; Andres et al., 1992]