Step-by-step growth of epitaxially aligned polythiophene by surface-confined reaction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the great challenges in surface chemistry is to assemble aromatic building blocks into ordered structures that are mechanically robust and electronically interlinked--i.e., are held together by covalent bonds. We demonstrate the surface-confined growth of ordered arrays of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) chains, by using the substrate (the 110 facet of copper) simultaneously as template and catalyst for polymerization. Copper acts as promoter for the Ullmann coupling reaction, whereas the inherent anisotropy of the fcc 110 facet confines growth to a single dimension. High resolution scanning tunneling microscopy performed under ultrahigh vacuum conditions allows us to simultaneously image PEDOT oligomers and the copper lattice with atomic resolution. Density functional theory calculations confirm an unexpected adsorption geometry of the PEDOT oligomers, which stand on the sulfur atom of the thiophene ring rather than lying flat. This polymerization approach can be extended to many other halogen-terminated molecules to produce epitaxially aligned conjugated polymers. Such systems might be of central importance to develop future electronic and optoelectronic devices with high quality active materials, besides representing model systems for basic science investigations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".