Development of interatomic ReaxFF potentials for Au-S-C-H systems.

We present fully reactive interatomic potentials for systems containing gold, sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen, employing the ReaxFF formalism. The potential is designed especially for simulating gold-thiol systems and has been used for studying cluster deposition on self-assembled monolayers. Additionally, a large number of density functional theory calculations are reported, including molecules containing the aforementioned elements and adsorption energetics of molecules and atoms on gold.