Black Phosphorus for Directed Molecular Assembly with Weak Electronic Coupling

Mehdi Bouatou (1) , Rishav Harsh (1) , Cyril Chacon (1) , Yann Girard (1) , Vincent Repain (1) , Amandine Bellec (1) , Sylvie Rousset (1) , Alexander Smogunov (2) , Yannick J Dappe (2) , Jérôme Lagoute (1)

1 MPQ (UMR_7162) - Laboratoire Matériaux et Phénomènes Quantiques
2 SPEC - UMR3680 - Service de physique de l'état condensé

The combination of two-dimensional materials with organic molecules offers the possibility to obtain low dimensional hybrid materials with tailored properties. Black phosphorus is a monoelemental semiconducting material with a non-planar puckered atomic structure. Here, we study porphyrin molecules on black phosphorus and show that they self-assemble with an epitaxial relationship indicating that the molecule-surface interaction largely dominates the molecule-molecule interaction. The atomic structure of black phosphorus is found to be at the origin of the substrate driven self-assembly. Despite this strong interaction with molecules, the electronic coupling is found to be weak allowing the molecules to maintain the properties of their gas phase, which is the usual behaviour for van der Waals materials. Therefore, the combination of the peculiar puckered structure with the van der Waals nature of black phosphorus provides this material with the ability to interact strongly enough with adsorbed molecules to drive their assembly but weakly enough to keep their electronic properties intact.

Mots clés: scanning tunneling microscopy; black phosphorus; molecules; density functional theory

Domaines: Matière Condensée [cond-mat]

Mehdi Bouatou, Rishav Harsh, Cyril Chacon, Yann Girard, Vincent Repain, et al.. Black Phosphorus for Directed Molecular Assembly with Weak Electronic Coupling. Advanced Materials Interfaces, 2021, pp.2101644. ⟨10.1002/admi.202101644⟩. ⟨hal-03397109⟩