Poppe A, Griffiths J, Hu S, Baumberg JJ, Osadchy M, Gibson S, de Nijs B. Mapping Atomic-Scale Metal-Molecule Interactions: Salient Feature Extraction through Autoencoding of Vibrational Spectroscopy Data.
J Phys Chem Lett 2023;
14:7603-7610. [PMID:
37594383 PMCID:
PMC10476190 DOI:
10.1021/acs.jpclett.3c01483]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/30/2023] [Accepted: 08/09/2023] [Indexed: 08/19/2023]
Abstract
Atomic-scale features, such as step edges and adatoms, play key roles in metal-molecule interactions and are critically important in heterogeneous catalysis, molecular electronics, and sensing applications. However, the small size and often transient nature of atomic-scale structures make studying such interactions challenging. Here, by combining single-molecule surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy with machine learning, spectra are extracted of perturbed molecules, revealing the formation dynamics of adatoms in gold and palladium metal surfaces. This provides unique insight into atomic-scale processes, allowing us to resolve where such metallic protrusions form and how they interact with nearby molecules. Our technique paves the way to tailor metal-molecule interactions on an atomic level and assists in rational heterogeneous catalyst design.
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