Reply to ‘On the bonding in ligand-protected gold clusters’

Authors

Wen Wu Xu, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics
Xiao Cheng Zeng, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Yi Gao, Shanghai Institute of Applied PhysicsFollow

ORCID IDs

Xiao Cheng Zeng http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4672-8585

Yi Gao http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6015-5694

Date of this Version

2017

Citation

Nature Communications 8: doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01294-w (2017)

Comments

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,

Abstract

In the recent Correspondence, Professor Henrik Grönbeck made several comments on the recently developed grand unified model (GUM), in particular using the ligand-protected gold cluster [Au₂₅(SR)₁₈]¹⁻ as an example. We noted that the latter cluster can be viewed as belonging to a special group of ligand-protected gold clusters that contain one or several icosahedral Au₁₃ motifs. For this group of clusters, a secondary block Au₁₃(8e) has been identified as a more convenient way to describe their structure anatomy and evolution. Another extension of the GUM is the identification of the new elementary block, Au₃(μ₃-S), with zero valence electron [referred as Au₃(μ₃-S)(0e)] to describe all crystallized ligand-protected gold clusters containing μ₃-S motifs. In this correspondence, first, we discuss the purpose of GUM development in more detail. Next, we briefly discuss the secondary block Au₁₃(8e) and show new computational results on the stabilities of Au₃(2e) and Au₄(2e) elementary blocks. Then two Au₆²⁺ clusters are used as the simplest example (a suggestion credited to a reviewer of ref. 2) to better explain the GUM and high stability of Au₃(2e), followed by a summary and perspective.