SMART THEME · Surface-supported Molecular ARchiTectures: THEory Meets Experiment

Surface-supported Molecular ARchiTectures: THEory Meets Experiment

The future of nanoelectronics has been proposed to be switching soon from bulk 3D materials to lower dimensionalities. In the last twenty years much attention has been devoted to the study of intrinsic properties and assembling of new building blocks for future electronics such as 2D layered materials or molecular semiconductors. In a very short time this rapidly growing field has moved from fundamental questions on the physics and chemistry of its elemental components to the realization of the first proofs of principle of nano-electronic devices. However, the high atomic level control required by these new architectures can hardly be achieved by top-down approaches conventionally employed in current nano-electronic fabrication. In the last years a very promising and effective way emerged, generally called “on surface synthesis”, based on a novel bottom-up approach where supramolecular organizations and nanostructures can be built up with atomic precision from well-designed molecular precursors self organizing and reacting at metallic surfaces. Up to now, these techniques have been successfully employed to grow a variety of low dimensional systems as well as of ordered metallo-organic frameworks, graphene nanoribbons with defined widths and edge types or extended graphdiyne wires. The design of an effective synthesis protocol is a lengthy and expensive trial-and-error process involving several iterative steps: the synthesis of molecular precursors, the effective nanostructure growth, the characterization of the products by microscopy and spectroscopy techniques. Furthermore, the interaction of the grown architectures with the underlying surface and the chemical reactivity of these complex systems with respect to their elemental components are poorly understood and generally hard to investigate. The need for a precise atomic description of structures and chemical processes is becoming more urgent and its lack is increasingly becoming a barrier to rapid progresses towards scaling up and industrialization of the processes. In a synergy between theory and experiments, research in the field can be improved and sped up thanks to optimization guidelines derived from advanced modeling. Controllable growth parameters can be extracted from a quantum level description of the molecular precursors, of the basic steps of the synthesis process and of the self-organization mechanisms at the surfaces. The SMART-THEME (Surface-supported Molecular ARchiTectures: THEory Meets Experiments) project aimed to identify, in a synergy between theory and experiments, new routes toward novel organic/inorganic hybrid nanostructured materials with tailored characteristics.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз