Interaction between fullerene-wheeled nanocar and gold substrate: A DFT study

• Ab initio DFT calculations were used for interaction of nanocar with Au surface.
• Full structural optimization was performed for several possible active sites.
• Electronic structure of the energetically favorable complexes was analyzed.
• The binding energy of nanocar/Au was determined to be −217.45 kcal/mol.
• DFT-MD simulation was performed for a C60 on gold surface at ambient condition.

Since the successful synthesis of nanocar and its surprising movement on the gold surface, several theoretical investigations have been devoted to explain the interaction properties as well as its movement mechanism on the substrate. All of them failed, however, to gain a clear theoretical insight into the respected challenges because of the weak computational methods implemented for this complex system including heavy metal atoms and giant size of the whole system. In this work, we have investigated the adsorption of fullerene-wheeled nanocar onto a Au (1 1 1) substrate using the comprehensive first-principles density functional theory (DFT) simulations. The binding energy between the nanocar and Au (1 1 1) surface was determined to be −9.43 eV (−217.45 kcal/mol). The net charge transfer from the nanocar to the gold substrate was calculated to be about 9.56 electrons. Furthermore, the equilibrium distances between the Au surface and the C60 molecule and nanocar chassis were estimated to be 2.20 Å and 2.30 Å, respectively. The BSSE correction was also considered in the binding energy estimation and the result show that the BSSE correction significantly affects the calculated binding energy for such systems.Finally, we have performed ab initio molecular dynamics simulation for a single C60 fullerene on the gold surface at room temperature. Our first-principles result shows that ambient condition affect remarkably on the adsorption property of fullerene on the gold surface. We also observed that the C60 fullerene wheel slips by approximately 3.90 Å within 5 ps of simulation time at 300 K.

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