Non-additivity of molecule-surface van der Waals potentials from force measurements

Christian Wagner (), Norman Fournier, Victor G. Ruiz, Chen Li, Klaus Müllen, Michael Rohlfing, Alexandre Tkatchenko, Ruslan Temirov and F. Stefan Tautz
Additional contact information
Christian Wagner: Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-3), Forschungszentrum Jülich
Norman Fournier: Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-3), Forschungszentrum Jülich
Victor G. Ruiz: Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Chen Li: Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung
Klaus Müllen: Max-Planck-Institut für Polymerforschung
Michael Rohlfing: Institut für Festkörpertheorie der Universität Münster
Alexandre Tkatchenko: Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Ruslan Temirov: Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-3), Forschungszentrum Jülich
F. Stefan Tautz: Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-3), Forschungszentrum Jülich

Nature Communications, 2014, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Van der Waals (vdW) forces act ubiquitously in condensed matter. Despite being weak on an atomic level, they substantially influence molecular and biological systems due to their long range and system-size scaling. The difficulty to isolate and measure vdW forces on a single-molecule level causes our present understanding to be strongly theory based. Here we show measurements of the attractive potential between differently sized organic molecules and a metal surface using an atomic force microscope. Our choice of molecules and the large molecule-surface separation cause this attraction to be purely of vdW type. The experiment allows testing the asymptotic vdW force law and its validity range. We find a superlinear growth of the vdW attraction with molecular size, originating from the increased deconfinement of electrons in the molecules. Because such non-additive vdW contributions are not accounted for in most first-principles or empirical calculations, we suggest further development in that direction.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6568 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:5:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms6568

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6568

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().