Investigating Charge Transfer and controlling supramolecular self-assembly at surfaces

by Ada Della Pia (University of Warwick, Coventry, UK)

Thursday 19 Dec 2013, 16:30 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula 4 (Dip. di Fisica - edificio E. Fermi)

Recently there has been much interest in designing and producing green, small and cheap electronics based on organic active materials. Most applications require the deposition of thin molecular films onto conductive electrodes. The growth of the first few molecular layers represents a crucial step in the device fabrication since it determines the structure of the molecular film and the energy level alignment of the metal-organic junction. We investigated the formation of this junction by analysing how the choice of the metal-m! olecule combination influences the charge transfer (CT) at the metal-organic (MO) interface. By combining experiment (scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy) and theory (density functional theory calculations and Monte Carlo simulations), we demonstrated that controlling CT at MO interfaces represents a novel method to steer 2D supramolecular assembly, to change the acceptor or donor properties of a codeposited molecular species and to fabricate novel supramolecular assemblies.