CRC 951/3: Design of Functional Molecular Building Blocks for Covalent and Non-Covalent Assembly at Semiconductor Surfaces (SP A03)

The overarching goal of this synthesis project was and is the creation of high quality, functional HIOS with unique characteristics that – in part – are governed by the structures of the custom-designed molecular building blocks. During the current funding period, we synthesized a variety of molecular building blocks to prepare structurally and compositionally well-defined HIOS. In particular, we were able to develop routes to conjugated organic molecules with defined inherent molecular properties, such as optical gap and oxidation/reduction potentials, and utilized the introduction of dipoles as well as of anchoring groups to direct their assembly, primarily on ZnO surfaces, using physisorption and chemisorption, respectively. Furthermore, photoswitchable molecules that undergo large changes in their dipole moments as well as frontier molecular orbital levels were developed and incorporated into HIOS and related opto-electronic and plasmonic functional structures and devices. In the upcoming funding period, we aim at combining optimized photoswitchable molecules with twodimensional semiconductors, primarily monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) to create new hybrid functionalities and devices.