title: Controllable Scission and Seamless Stitching of Metal-Organic Clusters by STM Manipulation.
abstract: Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) manipulation techniques have proven to be a powerful method for advanced nanofabrication of artificial molecular architectures on surfaces. With increasing complexity of the studied systems, STM manipulations are then extended to more complicated structural motifs. Previously, the dissociation and construction of various motifs have been achieved, but only in a single direction. In this report, the controllable scission and seamless stitching of metal-organic clusters have been successfully achieved through STM manipulations. The system presented here includes two sorts of hierarchical interactions where coordination bonds hold the metal-organic elementary motifs while hydrogen bonds among elementary motifs are directly involved in bond breakage and re-formation. The key to making this reversible switching successful is the hydrogen bonding, which is comparatively facile to be broken for controllable scission, and, on the other hand, the directional characteristic of hydrogen bonding makes precise stitching feasible.
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China).
authors: Huihui
authors: H
authors: Kong
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China).
authors: Likun
authors: L
authors: Wang
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China).
authors: Qiang
authors: Q
authors: Sun
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China).
authors: Chi
authors: C
authors: Zhang
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China).
authors: Qinggang
authors: Q
authors: Tan
authors: Tongji-Aarhus Joint Research Center for Nanostructures and Functional Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Caoan Road 4800, Shanghai 201804 (P. R. China). xuwei@tongji.edu.cn.
authors: Wei
authors: W
authors: Xu
keywords: density functional calculations; metal-organic clusters; scanning tunneling microscopy; surface chemistry