TY - GEN A1 - Laurinavichyute, Veronika K. A1 - Nizamov, Shavkat A1 - Mirsky, Vladimir M. T1 - Real time tracking of the early stage of electrochemical nucleation T2 - Electrochimica Acta N2 - An analysis of early stage of electrochemical nucleation is crucial in order to understand the mechanism of this process and for electrochemical synthesis of new materials. We show here an application of the wide field surface plasmon microscopy (WF-SPRM) for this purpose. It allows us in-situ monitoring of the growth of nuclei in the range from ~20 till over 1000 nm. The system registers the moment and the place of the formation of each individual nucleus for the total number of the tracked nuclei up to ~10,000 per 1 mm2. The results demonstrate that the integral information obtained from electrochemical measurements can be extracted quantitatively from optical measurements while optical data provide also information on the size of each individual nucleus, individual nucleation time, localization and growth kinetics, and allows one to distinguish the rate limiting stage for each individual nucleus. In this work WF-SPRM was applied for investigation of electrochemical deposition of copper on gold, but this technique can be extended easily to other materials or other nucleation types. KW - Surface plasmon resonance microscopy KW - Nucleation and growth KW - Copper deposition KW - Growth kinetics KW - Diffusion zones Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electacta.2021.138278 SN - 0013-4686 VL - 382 ER -