77 nanotimes News in Brief

Yousoo Kim at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute (ASI) in Wako and Maki Kawai at the University of Tokyo are exploring the electronic properties of thin films of organic molecules derived from fullerenes.By coating gold electrode surfaces with an ultra-thin layer of fluorinated fullerenes in the form of a powder, Kim, Kawai and their colleagues studied the properties of fluorinated fullerenes in detail using STM. They found that when they deposited the powder onto the gold at room temperature, fluorinated fullerene islands - just a single molecule thick – formed in patches across the gold surface. However, the orientation of molecules in these patches was jumbled, and the electronic properties of each island were inhomogeneous. When they gently warmed the gold surface, however, a very different picture emerged from the STM images: the islands had assembled into uniform films in which all molecules oriented in the same manner, with homogeneous electric behavior.

Tomoko K. Shimizu, Jaehoon Jung, Tetsuya Otani, Young-Kyu Han, Maki Kawai, and Yousoo Kim: Two-Dimensional Superstructure Formation of Fluorinated Fullerene on Au(111): A Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Study, In: ACS Nano, Vol. 6(2012),  Issue 3, March 27, 2012, Pages 2679-2685, DOI: 10.1021/nn300064x:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn300064x