Effect of solvent evaporation temperature on the structure of two-dimensional melamine networks on Au(111)

Abstract

By scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), we investigated two-dimensional (2D) structures of melamine formed on Au(111) surfaces by solvent evaporation. By increasing the evaporation temperature, the well-known ordered honeycomb 2D molecular phase, in which all molecules are linked by hydrogen bonding, changes to four coexisting phases, i.e., a 2D network consisting of linear segments, 1D molecular rows, and hexagonal and distorted hexagonal structures. The first two phases are sometimes observed in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) on metallic substrates other than Au. The last two phases have lattice parameters close to those of the well-known honeycomb structure. The structural change observed in this study is attributed to local temperature and concentration distributions of the solution and substrate surface during solvent evaporation. From the results, we found that the molecular nanostructures can be tailored by the solvent evaporation method with small changes in temperature.