Research data supporting "A new route to air-stable Cu(0) nanoparticles"

Research data supporting the full paper entitled "A new route to air-stable Cu(0) nanoparticles" by K.J. Jenkinson et al. in Polyhedron. A coating procedure for encapsulating Cu NPs inside a magnetite shell is demonstrated and the resulting core@shell systems show retention of Cu(0) and corresponding plasmonic behaviour. The following supporting data are deposited here: Transmission electron microscopy (TEM): NP dispersions were drop-cast onto a holey or lacey carbon film on 300 mesh Ni grid (Beijing XXBR Technology Co. Ltd., China). The dried grid was exposed to 20 seconds of plasma cleaning (25% O2:75% Ar) on a Fischione Model 1070 Nanoclean. TEM, STEM (scanning TEM), EDX (energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy) and EELS (electron energy loss spectroscopy) analyses used a Thermo Scientific (FEI) Talos F200X G2 TEM operating at 200 kV equipped with a Schottky X-FEG electron source, a Ceta 4k x 4k CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) camera, a Super-X EDX detector system with 4 windowless silicon drift detectors, and a Gatan Enfinium ER (977) EELS device. Data were enabled by EPSRC grant EP/P030467/1. Powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD): Patterns were measured on a PANalytical Empyrean diffractometer fitted with an X’celerator detector and a Cu-Kα1 (λ = 1.5406 Å) source, with a step size of 0.002° and scanning speed of 0.022° s−1 at 40 kV and 40 mA. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy: Analysis used a Thermo NEXSA G2 XPS spectrometer fitted with a monochromated Al-Kα X-ray source (1486.74 eV), a spherical sector analyser and 3 multichannel resistive plate, 128 channel delay line detectors. Data were recorded at 19.2 W and an X-ray beam size of 400 × 200 µm. Survey scans were recorded at a pass energy of 200 eV and high-resolution scans were recorded at a pass energy of 50 eV. Electronic charge neutralization used an ion source (Thermo Scientific FG-03). Ion gun current = 150 µA. Ion gun voltage = 40 V. Data were recorded at below 10-8 Torr and 294 K. The energetic position of the C 1 s emission line (binding energy 284.6 eV) was chosen for energy scale calibration. CASA XPS v2.3.26rev1.0N or Avantage v5.9931 software was used to analyse each spectrum. Peaks were fitted with a Shirley background prior to component analysis. Lineshapes of LA(1.53,243) were used to fit components. Data collection was through Cambridge Royce Facilities grant EP/P024947/1 and Sir Henry Royce Institute – recurrent grant EP/R00661X/1.