Oxidation state of oxide supported nanometric gold

We address the structure gap between surface science and catalysis studies of the activity of oxide supported Au clusters. Reviewing the recent literature we find that surface science investigations often deal with highly reduced systems that have anionic Au clusters and oxygen vacancies in the support. The catalysis studies on the other hand consistently report on oxidized samples with traces of cationic Au. Performing density functional theory calculations we show that the effect of oxidation of oxide supported Au clusters, Au₈/MgO, Au₇/TiO₂ and Au₁₀/TiO₂, is a strong increase in the Au/support adhesion energy and a great structural transformation of the clusters. Some of the Au atoms become positively charged (cationic) in the oxidation process as evidenced indirectly by calculated vibrational stretch frequency shifts of adsorbed CO.