Epitaxial growth of aligned atomically precise chevron graphene nanoribbons on Cu(111)

Jacob D Teeter; Paulo S Costa; Mohammad Mehdi Pour; Daniel P Miller; Eva Zurek; Axel Enders; Alexander Sinitskii

doi:10.1039/c6cc08006e

Epitaxial growth of aligned atomically precise chevron graphene nanoribbons on Cu(111)

Chem Commun (Camb). 2017 Jul 25;53(60):8463-8466. doi: 10.1039/c6cc08006e.

Authors

Jacob D Teeter¹, Paulo S Costa², Mohammad Mehdi Pour¹, Daniel P Miller³, Eva Zurek³, Axel Enders⁴, Alexander Sinitskii⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Chemistry, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. sinitskii@unl.edu.
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. aenders2@unl.edu.
³ Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA. ezurek@buffalo.edu.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. aenders2@unl.edu and Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA and Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bayreuth, Bayreuth, 95440, Germany.
⁵ Department of Chemistry, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA. sinitskii@unl.edu and Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA and National University of Science and Technology "MISiS", Moscow, 119991, Russia.

PMID: 28702538
DOI: 10.1039/c6cc08006e

Abstract

Atomically precise chevron graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) have been synthesized on Cu(111) substrates by the surface-assisted coupling of 6,11-dibromo-1,2,3,4-tetraphenyltriphenylene (C₄₂Br₂H₂₆) and thermal cyclodehydrogenation of the resulting polymer. The GNRs form on Cu(111) epitaxially along the 〈112〉 crystallographic directions, which was found to be in agreement with the computational results, and at lower temperatures than on Au(111). This work demonstrates that the substrate plays an important role in the on-surface synthesis of GNRs and can result in new assembly modes of GNR structures.