A facile electrochemical route to the preparation of uniform and monoatomic copper shells for gold nanoparticles.

Copper on gold forms a monolayer deposit via underpotential deposition. For gold particles adsorbed at a liquid-liquid interface this results in a uniform one monolayer thick shell. This approach offers a new route for the uniform functionalisation of nanoparticles and presents a way to probe fundamental processes that underlie nanoparticle synthesis.