Work of our MSB team selected for the 2018 PCCP HOT Articles

The paper entitled "An experimental and theoretical study of adenine adsorption on Au(111)"

and authored by Robert G. Acres, Xun Cheng, Klára Beranová, Sofiia Bercha, Tomáš Skála, Vladimír Matolín, Ye Xu, Kevin C. Prince, and Nataliya Tsud

has been highlighted by the editors of Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics as a HOT article in 2018. In connection with this decision, the article has been made free to access until the end of March 2019.

The work is a combined experimental and theoretical investigation of adenine bonding to the Au(111) surface. This model system was chosen in order to shed light on complex reactions related to electrochemical adenine deposition. More generally, the study contributes to understanding of interactions between simple biomolecules and gold surfaces, aiming for potential applications of gold nanoparticles in biotechnology and health care.

Our team prepared adenine adlayers on Au(111) by evaporation in vacuum as well as by deposition from saturated aqueous solution. Quite interestingly, the two different environments gave rise to two different molecular adsorption geometries: parallel and upright. The study details both adsorption geometries along with their electronic structures.

The experimental part of the study, which included characterization of the adlayers by means of XPS and NEXAFS, was carried out at our Materials Science Beamline under the supervision of Dr. Nataliya Tsud. The theoretical part, which comprised a series of DFT calculations, was conducted by the Computational Catalysis & Surface Chemistry group of Prof. Ye Xu at Louisiana State University, USA.