Chirality in bare and passivated gold nanoclusters

Detailed knowledge of the lattice structure, shape, morphology, surface structure, and bonding of bare and passivated gold clusters is fundamental to predict and understand their electronic, optical, and other physical and chemical properties. This information is essential to optimizing their utilization as novel nanocatalysts, 1 and as building-blocks of new molecular nanostructured materials, 2 with potential applications in nanoelectronics 3 and biological diagnostics. 4 An effective theoretical approach to determine gold cluster structures is to combine genetic algorithms and many-body potentials ~to perform global structural optimizations!, and first-principles density functional theory ~to confirm the energy ordering of the local minima!. Using this procedure we recently found many topologically interesting disordered gold nanoclusters with energy near or below the lowestenergy ordered isomer. 5‐ 8 The structures of these clusters