Implementation of simple logic gates on gold-ammonia bonding patterns in different charge states

in Molecular Physics (2008), 106(2-4), 521-530

An approach is proposed for encoding the gold-ammonia bonding patterns on the conformational manifold of the Au-n(Z)-(NH3)(m), Z=0, +/- 1, clusters in order to implement simple unary and binary logic gate ... [more ▼]

An approach is proposed for encoding the gold-ammonia bonding patterns on the conformational manifold of the Au-n(Z)-(NH3)(m), Z=0, +/- 1, clusters in order to implement simple unary and binary logic gate operations. The gold-ammonia bonding patterns are governed by two different basic ingredients: the anchoring Au-N bond and the nonconventional N-H center dot center dot center dot Au hydrogen bond, and exhibit distinct characteristics as the charge of the cluster varies within Z = 0, +/- 1. The conformers of the small cluster, Au-Z-(NH3)(2), and of the nanometric size one, Au-20(Z), are chosen as illustrative examples. The dependence of the bonding patterns on the overall charge state of the cluster allows to implement the logic gates NOT, FAN-OUT, AND, NAND, OR, NOR, INH, XOR, and XNOR and to identify the outputs using an IR readout protocol. [less ▲]