Molecular adsorption at metal electrodes

Abstract

This paper gives a brief review of our efforts to describe adsorption of organic molecules at gold and silver electrodes. We are using, as an example, pyridine to show the differences between adsorption of molecules at group IB metals and their adsorption at mercury ( sp metal) or platinum ( d metal) electrodes. We discuss the relationship between the character of adsorption and the electronic structure of the metal. Later, we describe the effect of surface crystallography on pyridine adsorption at gold single crystal electrodes. Finally, we assess the effect of molecular adsorption on the reconstruction phenomena using second harmonic generation (SHG) and electroreflectance (ER) spectroscopies.