Abstract
Accurate characterization of the nanocrystal shape with high statistical relevance is essential for exploiting the strongly shape-dependent properties of cuboidal nanoparticles toward applications. This work presents the development of a new small-angle scattering form factor based on the superball geometry. The superball quantifies the characteristic rounding of corners and edges of cuboidal nanoparticles with a single parameter. Applied to small-angle scattering data of sufficiently monodisperse nanoparticles, the superball form factor enables differentiation between the effects of extended particle size distribution and irregular particle shape. The quantitative application of the superball form factor is validated against microscopy data for a series of monodisperse nanoparticles and implemented into the user-friendly, open-source software Sasview.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 23356-23363 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Journal of Physical Chemistry C |
| Volume | 125 |
| Issue number | 42 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 28 2021 |
Funding
This work benefited from the use of the SasView application, originally developed under NSF award DMR-0520547. SasView contains the code developed with funding from the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the SINE2020 project, grant agreement no 654000. The authors thank Dr. Dirk Honecker for his support in implementing the form factor to Sasview. This collaboration has been partly carried out within the framework of the Ro\u0308ntgen-\u00C5ngstro\u0308m Cluster project nPDFSAS (BMBF project number 05K20PKA, VR project number 2019-06117). SU and GSA were financially supported by the Swedish Research Council, VR (research grant 2016-06959). Financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG: Emmy Noether grant DI 1788/2-1) is gratefully acknowledged.