Structural, Electronic, and Impurity‐Doping Effects in Nanoscale Chemistry: Supported Gold Nanoclusters

A nano gold rush: Nanoscale gold clusters on oxide surfaces exhibit unique catalytic activity (▴; R=chemical reactivity). The factors for these remarkable nanocatalytic properties are 1) structural dynamical fluxionality, 2) quantum size effects, 3) charge transfer from the support to the clusters, and 4) impurity doping effects (▪) that allow control of the electronic structure of small clusters.