Surface coverage and adsorption properties of 1-vinyl-1,2,4-triazole on Au(111) surface: a molecular dynamics study

CONTEXT

The adsorption of 1-vinyl-1,2,4-triazole monomers on Au(111) surface was investigated via molecular dynamics method. Our results indicate that the surface coverage varied depending on the concentration of the monomers. Specifically, as the concentration of the monomers increased, the surface coverage also increased. At the highest concentrations, we observed up to 73% coverage of the metal surface. We show that the 1-vinyl-1,2,4-triazole monomers display a strong adsorption on gold surface, and the monomer binds to metal surface via heterocyclic pyridine-like nitrogen, and the distance between near nitrogen to gold is estimated to be 0.25 nm. Note that upon the concentration increase, we track the different layers of adsorption.

METHOD

The 1-vinyl-1,2,4-triazole (VT) molecule was created using online resources of MOLVIEW. The Au {111} facet was taken from our previous simulation, and as a force field, the CHARMM-GOIP concept was used. As a water model, the SPC approach was used. The latest version of GROMACS with GPU support was used. The snapshots were generated with the VMD package.

Structure of arginine overlayers at the aqueous gold interface: implications for nanoparticle assembly

Adsorption of small biomolecules onto the surface of nanoparticles offers a novel route to generation of nanoparticle assemblies with predictable architectures. Previously, ligand-exchange experiments on citrate-capped gold nanoparticles with the amino acid arginine were reported to support linear nanoparticle assemblies. Here, we use a combination of atomistic modeling with experimental characterization to explore aspects of the assembly hypothesis for these systems. Using molecular simulation, we probe the structural and energetic characteristics of arginine overlayers on the Au(111) surface under aqueous conditions at both low- and high-coverage regimes. In the low-density regime, the arginines lie flat on the surface. At constant composition, these overlayers are found to be lower in energy than the densely packed films, although the latter case appears kinetically stable when arginine is adsorbed via the zwitterion group, exposing the charged guanidinium group to the solvent. Our findings suggest that zwitterion-zwitterion hydrogen bonding at the gold surface and minimization of the electrostatic repulsion between adjacent guanidinium groups play key roles in determining arginine overlayer stability at the aqueous gold interface. Ligand-exchange experiments of citrate-capped gold nanoparticles with arginine derivatives agmatine and N-methyl-l-arginine reveal that modification at the guanidinium group significantly diminishes the propensity for linear assembly of the nanoparticles.