Abstract
Engineering atomic structures at metal surfaces represents an important step in the development of novel nanomaterials and nanodevices, but relies predominantly on atomic/molecular beam epitaxy under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, where controlling the deposition processes remains challenging. By using solution-borne nanosized gold clusters as a precursor, here we develop a wet deposition protocol to the fabrication of atomically flat gold nanoislands, so as to utilize the dynamic exchange of surface-active molecules at the liquid-metal interface for manipulating the growth kinetics of ultrathin metallic nanostructures. While remarkable shape and size selection of gold nanoislands is observed, our experimental and theoretical investigations provide compelling evidences that organic adsorbates can impart a bias to the island orientation by preferred adsorption and alignment and intervene in the assembly and disassembly of adatom islands by complexing with Au adatoms. This approach offers a simple solution to regulate atomic layer growth of metals at ambient conditions.
Highlights
Engineering atomic structures at metal surfaces represents an important step in the development of novel nanomaterials and nanodevices, but relies predominantly on atomic/ molecular beam epitaxy under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, where controlling the deposition processes remains challenging
In the last three decades, surfacesupported nanostructures comprised of a limited number or a few layers of metal atoms, including two dimensional (2D) metallic islands and ultrathin films, have been the subject of intense study by means of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS)[3,4,5,6,7], for getting insight into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics[8,9,10,11], and in quest for novel electronic[12,13], magnetic[14,15] and catalytic[16,17] properties to meet the demands of new and advanced materials
The most prevalent avenue to prepare ultrathin metallic films is via atomic/molecular beam epitaxy, which operates under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions at low temperature[24]
Summary
Engineering atomic structures at metal surfaces represents an important step in the development of novel nanomaterials and nanodevices, but relies predominantly on atomic/ molecular beam epitaxy under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, where controlling the deposition processes remains challenging. We develop a wet deposition protocol, by using solutionborne nanometer-size gold clusters as a source of gold adatoms, and present a simple approach for controlling the growth of gold nanoislands at surfaces, by applying helicenes containing thioether moieties as an additive to skew the atomic layer deposition at the liquid-metal interface (Fig. 1a–d).
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