Collective concerted motion in a molecular adlayer visualized through the surface diffusion of isolated vacancies

We have measured STM movies to study the diffusion of individual vacancies in a self-assembled layer of a tetrathiafulvalene derivative (exTTF) on Au(111) at room temperature. The diffusion is anisotropic, being faster along the compact direction of the molecular lattice. A detailed analysis of the anisotropic displacement distribution of the single vacancies shows that the relative abundance of double jumps (that is, the collective motion of molecular dimers) with respect to single jumps is rather large, the number of double jumps being more than 20% of the diffusion events. We conjecture that the relative abundances of long jumps might be related to the strength of the intermolecular bonding and the misfit of the molecular overlayer with the substrate lattice.