Peeling by Nanomechanical Forces: A Route to Selective Creation of Surface Structures

An emerging route to nanostructured hybrid organic-metal interfaces with tailored properties is their manipulation by nanomechanical forces as exerted by STM and AFM tips. Yet, despite impressive experimental progress, close to nothing is known about the underlying atomistic mechanisms of such nanomechanical techniques, thus hindering predictive, rational approaches. Here, we identify "surface peeling" as an important new mechanism for the modification of surfaces. Using density-functional calculations of thiolate self-assembled monolayers at gold and silver, we find that this phenomenon is very sensitive to the force vector, resulting in a high anisotropy in the systems' response that can be exploited for the selective creation of novel hybrid surfaces.