Ligand effects on the structure and vibrational properties of the thiolated Au18 cluster

Most of the studies devoted to thiolated gold clusters suppose that their core and Au-S framework do not suffer from distortion independently of the protecting ligands (-SR) and it is assumed as correct to simplify the ligand as SCH3. In this work is delivered a systematic study of the structure and vibrational properties (IR and Raman) of the Au-18(SR)(14) cluster. The pursued goal is to understand the dependency of the displayed vibrational properties of the thiolated Au-18 cluster with the ligands type. A set of six ligands was considered during calculations of the vibrational properties based on density functional theory (DFT) and in its dispersion-corrected approach (DFT-D).