Layer-resolved photoemission tomography: Thep-sexiphenyl bilayer upon Cs doping

Abstract

The buried interface between a molecular thin film and the metal substrate is generally not accessible to the photoemission experiment. With the example of a sexiphenyl ($6\mathrm{P}$) bilayer on Cu we show that photoemission tomography can be used to study the electronic level alignment and geometric structure, where it was possible to assign the observed orbital emissions to the individual layers. We further study the Cs doping of this bilayer. Initial Cs exposure leads to a doping of only the first interface layer, leaving the second layer unaffected except for a large energy shift. This result shows that it is in principle possible to chemically modify just the interface, which is important to issues like tuning of the energy level alignment and charge transfer to the interface layer. Upon saturating the film with Cs, photoemission tomography shows a complete doping ($6{p}^{4\ensuremath{-}}$) of the bilayer, with the molecular geometry changing such that the spectra become dominated by $\ensuremath{\sigma}$-orbital emissions.