ИСТИНА

We set ourselves the task to perform a systematic study of the ortho–para conversion of protium catalyzed by γ-Al2O3-supported gold nanoparticles of various sizes at a temperature of 77 K. Our results unambiguously indicate that nanoparticles, as opposed to the bulk metal, shown a high catalytic activity. It is exhibited that all Au/γ-Al2O3 catalysts with nanoparticles of 4.6-40.1 nm sizes show very high catalytic activity in ortho-para conversion reaction. The calculated specific catalytic activity Ksp of ortho-para hydrogen conversion were (3.9 ± 1.2) × 1014 mol cm-2∙s-1 for all of the catalysts tested. The conversion of o-protium to p-protium catalyzed by gold nanoparticles does not depend on the nanoparticle size.