Structural Transition of Gold Nanoclusters: From the Golden Cage to the Golden Pyramid

old is the most inert metal in the periodic table. However, at nano-meter scale, supported gold par-ticles have been shown to display a remark-able repertoire of catalytic activities.1 This discovery has stimulated a renaissance of investigations on the structures and proper-ties of gaseous gold clusters, which pro-vide atomically defined models for under-standing the mechanisms of the catalytic effects of gold nanoparticles. A diverse set of structures has been observed experimen-tally and proposed theoretically for a vari-ety of gold clusters. In particular, the struc-tures of gold cluster anions Aun in the siz