Two dimensional (2D) atomic layered nanomaterials exhibit some of the most striking phenomena in modern materials research and hold promise for a wide range of applications including energy and biomedical technologies. Graphene has received much attention for having extremely high surface area to mass ratio and excellent electric conductivity. Graphene has also been shown to maximize the activity of surface-assembled metal nanoparticle catalysts due to its unique characteristics of enhancing mass transport of reactants to catalysts. This paper specifically investigates the strategy of pre-formed nanoparticle self-assembly used for the formation of various metal nanoparticles supported on graphene families such as graphene, graphene oxide, and reduced graphene oxide and aims at understanding the interactions between ligand-capped metal nanoparticles and 2D nanomaterials. By varying the functional groups on the ligands between alkyl, aromatic, amine, and alcohol groups, different interactions such as van der Waals, π-π stacking, dipole-dipole, and hydrogen bonding are formed as the 2D hybrids produced.

This article shows the coarsening behavior of nanoparticle multilayers during heat treatments which produce larger metallic nanostructures with varying shapes and sizes on glass slides. Nanoparticle multilayer films are initially constructed via the layer-by-layer self-assembly of small and monodispersed gold and/or palladium nanoparticles with different compositions (gold only, palladium only, or both gold and palladium) and assembly orders (compounding layers of gold layers over palladium layers or vice versa). Upon heating the slides at 600°C, the surface nanoparticles undergo coalescence becoming larger nanostructured metallic films. UV-Vis results show a clear reliance of the layering sequence on the optical properties of these metal films, which demonstrates an importance of the outmost (top) layers in each nanoparticle multilayer films. Topographic surface features show that the heat treatments of nanoparticle multilayer films result in the nucleation of nanoparticles and the formation of metallic cluster structures. The results confirm that different composition and layering sequence of nanoparticle multilayer films clearly affect the coalescence behavior of nanoparticles during heat treatments.