STM studies of the self-assembly of manganese porphyrin catalysts at the Au(111)-n-tetradecane interface

The precise structure of monolayers of catalytic manganese porphyrins at the interface of an Au(111)-surface and an n-tetradecane liquid has been determined in a liquid-cell scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Before the addition of the manganese porphyrins, an ordered monolayer of lamellae of n-tetradecane molecules on the Au(111) surface could be imaged. It was found that only domain boundaries in this monolayer were correlated to the underlying gold surface, but not the orientation of the n-tetradecane lamellae and the molecules within them. Both the reconstruction of the Au(111) surface and the ordering of the first layer of n-tetradecane can direct the ordering of the manganese porphyrins that are subsequently added to the liquid phase