Crystal Structure of Barrel-Shaped Chiral Au130(p-MBT)50 Nanocluster

Yuxiang Chen; Chenjie Zeng; Chong Liu; Kristin Kirschbaum; Chakicherla Gayathri; Roberto R Gil; Nathaniel L Rosi; Rongchao Jin

doi:10.1021/jacs.5b05378

Crystal Structure of Barrel-Shaped Chiral Au130(p-MBT)50 Nanocluster

J Am Chem Soc. 2015 Aug 19;137(32):10076-9. doi: 10.1021/jacs.5b05378. Epub 2015 Aug 5.

Authors

Yuxiang Chen¹, Chenjie Zeng¹, Chong Liu², Kristin Kirschbaum, Chakicherla Gayathri¹, Roberto R Gil¹, Nathaniel L Rosi², Rongchao Jin¹

Affiliations

¹ †Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.
² ‡Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, United States.

PMID: 26244606
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b05378

Abstract

We report the structure determination of a large gold nanocluster formulated as Au130(p-MBT)50, where p-MBT is 4-methylbenzenethiolate. The nanocluster is constructed in a four-shell manner, with 55 gold atoms assembled into a two-shell Ino decahedron. The surface is protected exclusively by -S-Au-S- staple motifs, which self-organize into five ripple-like stripes on the surface of the barrel-shaped Au105 kernel. The Au130(p-MBT)50 can be viewed as an elongated version of the Au102(SR)44. Comparison of the Au130(p-MBT)50 structure with the recently discovered icosahedral Au133(p-TBBT)52 nanocluster (where p-TBBT = 4-tert-butylbenzenethiolate) reveals an interesting phenomenon that a subtle ligand effect in the para-position of benzenethiolate can significantly affect the gold atom packing structure, i.e. from the 5-fold twinned Au55 decahedron to 20-fold twinned Au55 icosahedron.