Identification of an AgS2 Complex on Ag(110)

Peter M Spurgeon; Da-Jiang Liu; Junepyo Oh; Yousoo Kim; Patricia A Thiel

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-56275-4

Identification of an AgS₂ Complex on Ag(110)

Sci Rep. 2019 Dec 27;9(1):19842. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-56275-4.

Authors

Peter M Spurgeon¹, Da-Jiang Liu², Junepyo Oh³, Yousoo Kim³, Patricia A Thiel^{4

2

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA. peterms@iastate.edu.
² Ames Laboratory of the USDOE, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA.
³ RIKEN Surface and Interface Science Laboratory, RIKEN, Wako, Saitama, 351-0198, Japan.
⁴ Department of Chemistry, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA.
⁵ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, 50011, USA.

Abstract

Adsorbed sulfur has been investigated on the Ag(110) surface at two different coverages, 0.02 and 0.25 monolayers. At the lower coverage, only sulfur adatoms are present. At the higher coverage, there are additional bright features which we identify as linear, independent AgS₂ complexes. This identification is based upon density functional theory (DFT) and its comparison with experimental observations including bias dependence and separation between complexes. DFT also predicts the absence of AgS₂ complexes at low coverage, and the development of AgS₂ complexes around a coverage of 0.25 monolayers of sulfur, as is experimentally observed. To our knowledge, this is the first example of an isolated linear sulfur-metal-sulfur complex.