A new kind of chemical ‘glue’
Over the past three decades, researchers have found various applications of a method for attaching molecules to gold; the approach uses chemicals called thiols to bind the materials together. But while this technique has led to useful devices for electronics, sensing and nanotechnology, it has limitations. Now, an MIT team has found a new material that could overcome many of these limitations.The new approach uses a family of chemicals called carbenes to attach other substances to gold — and potentially to other material surfaces as well. The work, led by assistant professor of chemistry Jeremiah Johnson, has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by a team that also included professor of chemistry Troy Van Voorhis and graduate students Aleksandr Zhukhovitskiy and Michael Mavros.Thiols have two main limitations in binding other materials to gold, Johnson explains: The binding is relatively weak, so the attached molecules can come...