Non-chemisorbed gold-sulfur binding prevails in self-assembled monolayers.

Abstract

Gold-thiol contacts are ubiquitous across the physical and biological sciences in connecting organic molecules to surfaces. When thiols bind to gold in self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) the fate of the hydrogen remains a subject of profound debate-with implications for our understanding of their physical properties, spectroscopic features and formation mechanism(s). Exploiting measurements of the transmission through a molecular junction, which is highly sensitive to the nature of the molecule-electrode contact, we demonstrate here that the nature of the gold-sulfur bond in SAMs can be probed via single-molecule conductance measurements. Critically, we find that SAM measurements of dithiol-terminated molecular junctions yield a significantly lower conductance than solution measurements of the same molecule. Through numerous control experiments, conductance noise analysis and transport calculations based on density functional theory, we show that the gold-sulfur bond in SAMs prepared from the solution deposition of dithiols does not have chemisorbed character, which strongly suggests that under these widely used preparation conditions the hydrogen is retained.