Polymer adsorption on reconstructed Au(001): a statistical description of P3HT by scanning tunneling microscopy and...

We report on a combined theoretical and experimental characterization of isolated Poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) chains weakly adsorbed on a reconstructed Au(001) surface. The local chain conformations of in situ deposited P3HT molecules were investigated by means of scanning tunneling microscopy. For comparison, Monte Carlo simulations of the system were performed up to a maximum chain length of 60 monomer units. The dependence of the end-to-end distance and the radius of gyration on the polymer chain length shows a good agreement between experiment and Monte Carlo simulations using simple updates for short chains.