Tunneling spectroscopy of isolated gold clusters grown on thiol/dithiol mixed self-assembled monolayers

We report a scanning tunneling spectroscopy study on the size-tunable isolated gold nanoclusters grown on thiol/dithiol mixed self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) where the effect of neighboring clusters are practically excluded. The structure forms double tunnel junction system in which the spectra exhibit Coulomb staircases. With increasing cluster size the standard deviation of the offset charge distribution for clusters increases, accompanied with the increase of total capacitance. The results are qualitatively same with the previous ones where clusters are densely grown on the substrate, indicating that this behavior is an intrinsic property for the double tunnel junction structures of tip/vacuum/single cluster/SAMs/Au(1 1 1) systems.