Single-Molecule Kinetics Reveals a Hidden Surface Reaction Intermediate in Single-Nanoparticle Catalysis

Detecting and characterizing reaction intermediates is not only important and powerful for elucidating reaction mechanisms but also challenging in general because of the low populations of intermediates in a reaction mixture. Studying surface reaction intermediates in heterogeneous catalysis presents additional challenges, especially the ubiquitous structural heterogeneity among the catalyst particles and the accompanying polydispersion in reaction kinetics. Here we use single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to study two complementary types of Au nanocatalystsmesoporous-silica-coated Au nanorods (i.e., Au@mSiO2 nanorods) and bare 5.3 nm pseudospherical Au nanoparticlesat the single-particle, single-turnover resolution in catalyzing the oxidative deacetylation of amplex red by H2O2, a synthetically relevant and increasingly important probe reaction. For both nanocatalysts, the distributions of the microscopic reaction time from a single catalyst particle clearly reveal a kinetic intermediate, which is hidden when the data are averaged over many particles or only the time-averaged turnover rates are examined for a single particle. This intermediate is further resolvable by single-turnover kinetics at the subparticle level. Detailed single-molecule kinetic analysis leads to a quantitative reaction mechanism and supports that the intermediate is likely a surface-adsorbed one-electron-oxidized amplex red radical. The quantitation of kinetic parameters further allows for the evaluation of the large reactivity inhomogeneity among the individual nanorods and pseudospherical nanoparticles, and for Au@mSiO2 nanorods, it uncovers their size-dependent reactivity in catalyzing the first one-electron oxidation of amplex red to the radical. Such single-particle, single-molecule kinetic studies are expected to be broadly useful for dissecting reaction kinetics and mechanisms.