AVS 59th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition
    Electron Transport at the Nanoscale Focus Topic Thursday Sessions
       Session ET+SS+GR+SP-ThA

Invited Paper ET+SS+GR+SP-ThA1
Molecule Substrate Interactions Probed by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Thursday, November 1, 2012, 2:00 pm, Room 16

Session: Electron Transport at the Nanoscale: Molecules and Defects
Presenter: H.-J. Gao, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Correspondent: Click to Email
Molecule substrate interactions play an important role in constructing nanostructures of functionalities and controlling of the physical properties and thus have stimulated a great interest in the past decades. One of the challenges in this top is to make a single molecule or small quantum systems stably connected to a single metal atom on metal surfaces, and further to make the nanostructure create electric energy and optical/electro radiation. In the talk, I will present that by using Au adatoms of the Au(111) surface we have successfully formed a single molecule rotor array, isolated tetra-tert-butyl Zinc Phthalocyanine ((t-Bu)4-ZnPc) molecules sticking to the Au adatoms of the Au(111) and rotating on the surface at 78 K. This kind of single molecular rotor was also found to be controlled by the different sites of the Au(111) surface using low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Furthermore, by changing the molecular structure the same molecular family of the Pc, ZnPc and FePc can also modulate the rotation behavior of the molecular rotors. Given that the lateral structure of a molecule/substrate interface can be modified by the attachment of ligands, our results will be helpful for opening up the possibility to tailor physical properties of a single molecule or complex aggregates to the desired specifications.