Binding of Polyvinylpyrrolidone to Ag Surfaces: Insight into a Structure-Directing Agent from Dispersion-Corrected Density Functional Theory

We use dispersion-corrected density functional theory (DFT) to resolve the role of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) in the shape-selective synthesis of Ag nanostructures by probing the interaction of its 2-pyrrolidone (2P) ring with Ag(100) and Ag(111). We employ two different semiempirical methods for including van der Waals (vdW) interactions in DFT calculations: DFT+vdW(surf) and DFT-D2. We find that DFT-D2, in its original parametrization, overestimates the Ag metal dispersion interaction and causes an unphysical herringbone-like reconstruction of Ag(100). This can be remedied in DFT-D2 by using modified vdW parameters for Ag that account for many-body screening effects. The results obtained using DFT-D2 with the modified parameters agree well with experiment and with DFT+vdW(surf) results. We find that 2P binds more strongly to Ag(100) than Ag(111), consistent with experiment. We analyze the origins of the surface-sensitive binding and find that vdW attraction is stronger on Ag(111), but the direct chemical bonding of 2P is stronger on Ag(100). We also study the influence of strain on binding energies and find that tension tends to lower the vdW interaction with the surfaces, while increasing the direct chemical-bonding interaction, consistent with the d-band center model. Overall, our work indicates that strain has little impact on the structure directing capabilities of PVP, which is consistent with the fact that strained, 5-fold twinned Ag nanowires have extensive {100} facets and relative small {111} facets.