Journal
NATURE CHEMISTRY
Volume 9, Issue 2, Pages 152-156Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.2622
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Funding
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [SFB 858]
- Transregional Collaborative Research Center [TRR 61]
- Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2013CBA01600]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [61390501]
- Leibniz award
- Fonds der Chemischen Industrie
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Recently, N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) were introduced as alternative anchors for surface modifications and so offered many attractive features, which might render them superior to thiol-based systems. However, little effort has been made to investigate the self-organization process of NHCs on surfaces, an important aspect for the formation of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs), which requires molecular mobility. Based on investigations with scanning tunnelling microscopy and first-principles calculations, we provide an understanding of the microscopic mechanism behind the high mobility observed for NHCs. These NHCs extract a gold atom from the surface, which leads to the formation of an NHC-gold adatom complex that displays a high surface mobility by a ballbot-type motion. Together with their high desorption barrier this enables the formation of ordered and strongly bound SAMs. In addition, this mechanism allows a complementary surface-assisted synthesis of dimeric and hitherto unknown trimeric NHC gold complexes on the surface.
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