Journal
JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS
Volume 141, Issue 17, Pages -Publisher
AIP Publishing
DOI: 10.1063/1.4900511
Keywords
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [61321001]
- MOST of China [2011CB933001, 2013CB933404]
- European Research Council
- KAUST [FIC/2010/08]
- AMBER [12/RC/2278]
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The atomic structure and the electron transfer properties of hydrogen bonds formed between two carboxylated alkanethiol molecules connected to gold electrodes are investigated by employing the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism combined with density functional theory. Three types of molecular junctions are constructed, in which one carboxyl alkanethiol molecule contains two methylene, -CH2, groups and the other one is composed of one, two, or three -CH2 groups. Our calculations show that, similarly to the cases of isolated carboxylic acid dimers, in these molecular junctions the two carboxyl, -COOH, groups form two H-bonds resulting in a cyclic structure. When self-interaction corrections are explicitly considered, the calculated transmission coefficients of these three H-bonded molecular junctions at the Fermi level are in good agreement with the experimental values. The analysis of the projected density of states confirms that the covalent Au-S bonds localized at the molecule-electrode interfaces and the electronic coupling between -COOH and S dominate the low-bias junction conductance. Following the increase of the number of the -CH2 groups, the coupling between -COOH and S decreases deeply. As a result, the junction conductance decays rapidly as the length of the H-bonded molecules increases. These findings not only provide an explanation to the observed distance dependence of the electron transfer properties of H-bonds, but also help the design of molecular devices constructed through H-bonds. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.
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