Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Bottom-Up Shape Engineering Of Organic Molecular Single-Crystals, Griffin Reed

Scholars Week

The ability to fabricate complex submicron-scale components from inorganic crystalline semiconductor materials such as c-Si enables countless modern technologies, from microelectromechanical systems to integrated circuits. For single-crystal molecular materials on the other hand, comparable approaches to defining micron- and submicron-scale structure are much less well developed, in part because weak intermolecular binding forces make molecular crystals vulnerable to damage by conventional techniques such as reactive ion etching, wet etching, and energetic beam milling. Here we show how the same weak forces that are problematic for top-down patterning of molecular crystals can be exploited to enable controlled bottom-up growth, by leveraging …