Organizational chirality expression as a function of the chirality measure of simple amino alcohols on Cu(100)

Abstract

Chiral self-assembled molecular networks (SAMNs) are important for technological and fundamental reasons. In spite of the large number of works in this field, the mechanism of chirality transfer from single molecules to large-scale two-dimensional (2D) networks is not fully understood yet. This work reports on the self-assembly of simple amino alcohols with different chirality measures on Cu(100). Ethanolamine (2-amino-1-ethanol), alaninol (2-amino-1-propanol) and butanolamine (2-amino-1-butanol) adsorbed on Cu(100) have been investigated with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), low-energy electron diffraction (LEED), photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This study addresses the role of the single-molecule handedness in the global chirality expression, showing how the chirality measure of the precursors plays an important role in the formation of globally chiral superstructures.