Controlled Manipulation of Molecules on Metal Surfaces – Case Study of Benzene on Cu (001)

With the continued development of scanning probe microscopy techniques, the manipulation of single molecules has become possible. Thereby, the manipulation path can be chosen at will, and energy barriers can be quantified, as can the energy landscape around the molecule [1]. The molecules were either pushed, pulled, jumped to the tip, or did not move depending on the chemical surrounding of the molecule and the chemical identity of the tip. To preserve the accuracy of recovered tip-sample interaction, we used oscillation amplitudes significantly larger than the decay length of the tip-sample interaction potential [1-3]. For further insight, we compared measured energy landscapes and manipulation outcomes with computational results obtained using a search protocol [4]. References: [1] O. E. Dagdeviren et al., Nanotechnology 27 (2016). [2] O.E. Dagdeviren et al., Phy. Rev. App. 9 (2018). [3] O. E. Dagdeviren et al., Rev. of Scien. Ins. 90 (2019). [4] M. Todorovic et al. npj Comp Mat. 5 (2019).