The Melting Temperature of Au

Over the years there has been a lot of interest in the decrease in melting temperature of small metal particles, relative to the bulk, theoretically [104,105,106] as well as experimentally [107,108,109,110]. Extrapolations from high temperature measurements have suggested that, for gold particles 

The stability of the Au, cluster compound is of course supplied at least in part by the ligand shell, and this complicates a direct comparison of the above theoretical predictions for imaginary bare Au,. But experimentally, the presence of an MES spectrum consisting of a superposition of distinct lines of the natural linewidth for gold from four different structural sites also constitutes proof that gold core of the Au, cluster is, at least on the time scale of the MES measurements (i.e. 0.1 ps t 10 ps) [112,113], a solid up to temperatures of at least 30 K. Surface melting on this time scale can also be refuted for Au, for the same reason. The same has also been observed by MES on the water soluble compound Au, [46], 

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