New Horizon of Nanoparticle and Cluster Catalysis with Dendrimers

Among various approaches synthesizing metal nanoparticles and tiny clusters, a template method using dendrimers has significant advantages over other chemical approaches with respect to their synthetic precision and the scalability. A dendrimer of polydentate ligands assembles metal ions or salts into the interior allowing production of metal nanoparticles in the dendrimer. The dendrimer-encapsulated nanoparticles (DENS) exhibit unique and remarkable catalytic properties depending on the size and elemental formula. Recent advances in dendrimer chemistry even enabled the atom precise synthesis of subnanometer metal clusters that have been impossible to prepare by wet chemical methods. In addition, not only for the synthesis of metal nanoparticles and clusters, the dendrimer itself can also provide the modulation of activity and selectivity in the catalysis. In this review, we summarized the most relevant research in which the dendrimer was employed as the template, modulator, or stabilizer for nanoparticle synthesis for catalytic applications.