ИСТИНА

Air- and water-stable room-temperature ionic liquids (ILs) are an excellent alternative medium for electrodeposition of metals, alloys, and semiconductor materials [1]. They offer great opportunities for improvement of electrodeposition processes that are inefficient or difficult to realize in aqueous solutions or solutions based on organic solvents. Generally, ILs possess good intrinsic ionic conductivity, nonvolatility, high thermal stability, and wide electrochemical window. Furthermore, physico-chemical properties of ILs can be tuned by combination of different cations and anions. These features caused vast interest in studying ILs as deposition electrolytes [2]. However, fundamental understanding of the electrodeposition processes in ILs is only at a preliminary stage [3]. Here, we focus on the study of initial stages of metallic silver electrodeposition on Pt and Au single crystal surfaces in ILs with dicyanamide anion. These ILs exhibit rather low viscosity and provide good solubility of silver salts. For this study we employed conventional electrochemical techniques in combination with in situ and ex situ scanning probe microscopy (in situ STM and ex situ AFM). The possibility of epitaxial and 2D deposition of silver onto single crystal surfaces from ILs is investigated. Furthermore, we also examine stability of gold and platinum single crystal surfaces in chosen dicyanamide–containing ILs in the absence of a silver salt. The work is supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project no. 17-03-00602).