Contribution of hydrogen bonding to charge-transfer induced surface-enhanced Raman scattering of an intermolecular system comprising p-aminothiophenol and benzoic acid

We investigated the influence of hydrogen bonds (H-bonds) on the intermolecular interactions of a system comprising p-aminothiophenol (PATP) and benzoic acid (BA) using surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) for the first time. In this system, H-bonds form through intermolecular interactions between the –NH2 and –COOH groups and promote the charge-transfer (CT) transition from the Ag substrate to the adsorbed PATP molecules. Accordingly, the intensities of the non-totally symmetric vibrations (the b2-type bands) of PATP are influenced through the Herzberg–Teller contribution. This is clearly a BA concentration-dependent phenomenon. This behaviour can be attributed to an increase in the degree of conjugation of the system, which facilitates the CT process in the system with H-bonds. Furthermore, temperature-dependent SERS experiments and their two-dimensional (2D) correlation analysis confirmed that the formation of H-bonds facilitated the CT transition between the adsorbed molecules and substrate. The degree of CT was reduced by H-bond breakage that occurred with increasing temperature. An additional SERS experiment involving substituted BA molecules yielded similar conclusions.