Ultra-Dense, Highly Ordered and Thermally Stable Anthracene Monolayers on Ag(111) – The Impact of the Anchoring Group

The growth of high-quality and high charge mobility thin films of organic semiconductors, such as pentacene, is a prerequisite for numerous organic electronics applications. As demonstrated before for the gold electrodes, these parameters can be significantly improved by the use of anthracenethiol or -selenol self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) as an interfacial template layer. Here, we show that the use of silver instead of gold and carboxylate instead of thiol/selenol allows to fabricate anthracene monolayers with unprecedently high packing density, which even exceeds that in the anthracene single crystal and for the first time provides structure commensurate with the pentacene single crystal. Moreover, we show that these modifications lead to a radical improvement in the thermal stability of anthracene-based SAMs. The obtained results open up the possibility of using carboxylate-anchored anthracene monolayers on silver as a molecular template for facilitating the growth of high-quality anthracene and pentacene films for organic electronics.