Organization of size-selected platinum and indium clusters soft-landed on surfaces

Metal cluster cations are produced in a laser vaporization source, size selected in the gas phase by an electrostatic quadrupole deflector, and deposited on transmission electron microscopy grids coated with various substrates. The morphology of cluster assemblies is very dependent on the occurrence of diffusion, collision, and coalescence of incident particles on the surface. In this respect, indium and platinum clusters show very different behaviors: the former easily coagulate to form large entities when the latter do not coalesce and tend to form structured arrays with a uniform distance between first neighbors.