Metals Supported Water Monomers: the Bonding Nature Revisited

A single water monomer is known as a hard-to-observe molecule even in the presence of metal surfaces as supporting matrix. This review highlights effort in experimental characterizations and theoretical modeling of transition metals supported water monomers with attention given to its structure and bonding, together with the insights that we have provided into the bonding nature of the water-interactions by the newly employed projected PDOS (partial density of states) difference analysis, which is proved to be an effective tool to be elucidate such bonding nature. The general s-d hybridization and d-shell effect are summarized, and how these effects can be tuned by tailoring local surface configurations is discussed.