1. Two-stage growth for highly ordered epitaxial C$_{60}$ films on Au(111)
- Author
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Tully, Alexandra B., Greenwood, Rysa, Na, MengXing, King, Vanessa, Mårsell, Erik, Niu, Yuran, Golias, Evangelos, Mills, Arthur K., de Castro, Giorgio Levy, Michiardi, Matteo, Menezes, Darius, Yu, Jiabin, Zhdanovich, Sergey, Damascelli, Andrea, Jones, David J., and Burke, Sarah A.
- Subjects
Condensed Matter - Materials Science - Abstract
As an organic semiconductor and a prototypical acceptor molecule in organic photovoltaics, C$_{60}$ has broad relevance to the world of organic thin film electronics. Although highly uniform C$_{60}$ thin films are necessary to conduct spectroscopic analysis of the electronic structure of these C$_{60}$-based materials, reported C$_{60}$ films show a relatively low degree of order beyond a monolayer. Here, we develop a generalizable two-stage growth technique that consistently produces single-domain C$_{60}$ films of controllable thicknesses, using Au(111) as an epitaxially well-matched substrate. We characterize the films using low-energy electron diffraction, low-energy electron microscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy, and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). We report highly oriented epitaxial film growth of C$_{60}$/Au(111) from 1 monolayer (ML) up to 20 ML films. The high-quality of the C$_{60}$ thin films enables the direct observation of the electronic dispersion of the HOMO and HOMO-1 bands via ARPES without need for small spot sizes. Our results indicate a path for the growth of organic films on metallic substrates with long-range ordering., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures
- Published
- 2024