Interface engineering to attain a uniform and compact self-assembled monolayer (SAM) at atomically flat surfaces plays a crucial role in the bottom-up fabrication of organic molecular devices.
Here, we present a promising and operationally simple approach to the formation of uniform SAMs not only at ultra-flat single crystal metal surfaces, M(111) (M = Au, Pt, Pd, Rh, Ir), but also at the highly oriented pyrolytic graphite surface via M-C and C-C covalent bonds, respectively, upon efficient in-situ cleavage of trimethylsilyl (TMS) end groups of the molecules.

This work was carried out in the groups of Prof. Thomas Wandlowski and Prof. Silvio Decurtins / Dr. Shi-Xia Liu.

References:

• Y. Fu, S. Chen, A. Kuzume, A. Rudnev, C. Huang, V. Kaliginedi, M. Baghernejad, W. Hong, T. Wandlowski, S. Decurtins, S.-X. Liu;
  "Exploitation of desilylation chemistry in tailor-made functionalization on diverse surfaces"
  Nat. Commun., 6, 6403/1-7, (2015); doi:10.1038/ncomms7403.