Dissolved organic matter release and retention in ultisols in relation to land use patterns.

The application of organic fertilizer to maintain soil fertility and crop yield has been practiced for thousands of years in China. This practice improves soil carbon sequestration, due to the high level of dissolved organic matter (DOM) in organic manure. In this study, batch equilibrium studies were conducted to examine the capacity of three ultisols from areas under different land use patterns to retain dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) extracted from rape cake and chicken manure.

Supersaturation-dependent surface structure evolution: from ionic, molecular to metallic micro/nanocrystals.

Deduced from thermodynamics and the Thomson-Gibbs equation that the surface energy of crystal face is in proportion to the supersaturation of crystal growth units during the crystal growth, we propose that the exposed crystal faces can be simply tuned by controlling the supersaturation, and higher supersaturation will result in the formation of crystallites with higher surface-energy faces. We have successfully applied it for the growth of ionic (NaCl), molecular (TBPe), and metallic (Au, Pd) micro/nanocrystals with high-surface-energy faces. The above proposed strategy can be rationally designed to synthesize micro/nanocrystals with specific crystal faces and functionality toward specific applications.

Surfactant-concentration-dependent shape evolution of Au-Pd alloy nanocrystals from rhombic dodecahedron to trisoctahedron and hexoctahedron.

The surface structure-controlled synthesis of noble metal nanocrystals (NCs) bounded by high-index facets has become a hot research topic due to their potential to significantly improve catalytic performance. This study reports the preparation of monodisperse Au-Pd alloy NCs with systematic shape evolution from rhombic dodecahedral (RD) to trisoctahedral (TOH), and hexoctahedral (HOH) structures by varying the concentration of surfactant in the surfactant-mediated synthesis. The as-prepared three kinds of alloy NCs possess almost the same size and composition as each other.