Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme
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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 74: Organic Molecules at Surfaces 5: Molecular Switches
O 74.11: Talk
Thursday, September 8, 2022, 17:30–17:45, S054
Design Principles for Metastable Standing Molecules — Hadi H. Arefi1, Marvin Knol1, Daniel Corken2, James Gardner2, F. Stefan Tautz1, Reinhard J. Maurer2, and •Christian Wagner1 — 1Peter Grünberg Institut (PGI-3), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany — 2Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Molecular nanofabrication with a scanning probe microscope is a promising route towards the prototyping of metastable functional molecular structures and devices which do not form spontaneously. The aspect of mechanical stability is crucial for such structures especially if they extend into the third dimension vertical to the surface. A prominent example are freestanding molecules on a metal which can function as field emitters or electric field sensors[1,2]. Improving the stability of such molecular configurations is an optimization task involving many degrees of freedom. Here, we present a combination of scanning probe experiments with ab initio potential energy calculations to investigate the stability of a prototypical standing molecule. We cast our results into a simple set of universal design principles for such metastable structures, the validity of which we demonstrate in two computational case studies. This offers the intuition needed to fabricate new devices without tedious trial and error.
[1] T. Esat, N. Friedrich, F. S. Tautz, R. Temirov, Nature 558, 573 (2018)
[2] C. Wagner, M. F. B. Green, P. Leinen, T. Deilmann, P. Krüger, M. Rohlfing, R. Temirov, F. S. Tautz, PRL 115, 026101 (2015)