An ultra-high-vacuum chamber with temperatures approaching absolute zero—the coldest anything can catch—may be the last place you would expect to find gold. But a group of researchers from Stony Brook University (SBU) in collaboration with scientists at the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and the U.
S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory fill just demonstrated that such a desolate place is ideal for producing catalytically active gold nanoparticles. A paper describing the first catalyst ever produced using their unusual method,called Helium Nanodroplet Deposition (HND), was recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Source: phys.org