The chemical doping of graphene is a promising route to improve the performances of graphene-based devices through enhanced chemical reactivity, catalytic activity, or transport characteristics. Understanding the interaction of molecules with doped graphene at the atomic scale is therefore a leading challenge to be overcome for the development of graphene-based electronics and sensors. Here, we use scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to study the electronic interaction of pristine and nitrogen-doped graphene with self-assembled tetraphenylporphyrin molecules. We provide an extensive measurement of the electronic structure of single porphyrins on Au(111), thus revealing an electronic decoupling effect of the porphyrins adsorbed on graphene. A tip-induced switching of the inner hydrogen atoms of porphyrins, first identified on Au(111), is observed on graphene, allowing the identification of the molecular conformation of porphyrins in the self-assembled molecular layer. On nitrogen-doped graphene, a local modification of the charge transfer around the nitrogen sites is evidenced via a downshift of the energies of the molecular elecronic states. These data show how the presence of nitrogen atoms in the graphene network modifies the electronic interaction of organic molecules with graphene. These results provide a basic understanding for the exploitation of doped graphene in molecular sensors or nanoelectronics.
The combination of graphene with molecules offers promising opportunities to achieve new functionalities. In these hybrid structures, interfacial charge transfer plays a key role in the electronic properties and thus has to be understood and mastered. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and ab initio density functional theory calculations, we show that combining nitrogen doping of graphene with an electric field allows for a selective control of the charge state in a molecular layer on graphene. On pristine graphene, the local gating applied by the tip induces a shift of the molecular levels of adsorbed molecules and can be used to control their charge state. Ab initio calculations show that under the application of an electric field, the hybrid molecule/graphene system behaves like an electrostatic dipole with opposite charges in the molecule and graphene sub-units that are found to be proportional to the electric field amplitude, which thereby controls the charge transfer. When local gating is combined with nitrogen doping of graphene, the charging voltage of molecules on nitrogen is greatly lowered. Consequently, applying the proper electric field allows one to obtain a molecular layer with a mixed charge state, where a selective reduction is performed on single molecules at nitrogen sites.
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