X-ray magnetic circular dichroism of size-selected, thiolated gold clusters

We report herein the X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) at the Au L2,3 edges of a series of Au clusters protected by glutathione (GSH). The samples used here included AuN(SG)M with (N, M) = (10, 10), (15, 13), (18, 14), (22, 16), (25, 18), (29, 20), (39, 24) and a sodium gold(I) thiomalate (SGT) as a reference. Magnetic moments per cluster were found to be increased with size, whereas those per Au-S bond were nearly constant. This finding suggests that a localized hole created by Au-S bonding at the gold/glutathione interface, rather than the quantum size effect, is responsible for the spin polarization of gold clusters.