Patterned Growth of Organic Semiconductors: Selective Nucleation of Perylene on Self-Assembled Monolayers

Organic semiconductors (OSC) have received a large amount of attention because they afford the fabrication of flexible electronic devices. However, the limited resistance to radiation and etching of such materials does not permit their patterning by photolithography, which has been a driving force for the development of integrated circuits and therefore requires alternative structuring techniques. One approach is based on precoating the substrate with self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) to control the nucleation of subsequently deposited OSC layers, but the underlying mechanism is barely understood. Here, we used alkanethiols with different chemical terminations to prepare SAMs on gold substrates serving as model systems to identify the mechanism of selective nucleation for the case of the OSC perylene. Using atomic force microscopy and fluorescence microscopy, we demonstrate that the chemical functionalization of the SAMs determines the adhesion forces for the OSC that are smallest for CF3-terminated and largest for OH-terminated SAMs, hence yielding distinctly different sticking probabilities upon perylene deposition at room temperature. Microcontact printing and immersion were employed to prepare SAM patterns that enable the selective growth of polycrystalline perylene films. A quite different situation is found upon printing long-chain thiols with low vapor pressure, which leads to the transfer of multilayers and favors the growth of perylene single crystallites. In a more abstract scenario, patterns of silicone oil droplets were printed on a gold substrate, which was previously covered with a repelling fluorinated SAM. Such droplets provide nucleation centers for liquid-mediated growth, often yielding platelet-shaped perylene single crystallites without unwanted perylene nucleation on the remaining surface.