Corroles are versatile chemically active agents in solution.
Expanding
their applications toward surface-supported systems requires a fundamental
knowledge of corrole–surface interactions. We employed the
tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope as local probe
to investigate at the single-molecule level the electronic and geometric
properties of surface-supported free-base corrole molecules. To provide
a suitable reference for other corrole-based systems on surfaces,
we chose the archetypal 5,10,15-tris(pentafluorophenyl)corrole [H3(TpFPC)] as model system, weakly adsorbed on two surfaces
with different interaction strengths. We demonstrate the nondissociative
adsorption of H3(TpFPC) on pristine Au(111) and on an intermediate
organic layer that provides sufficient electronic decoupling to investigate
geometric and frontier orbital electronic properties of almost undisturbed
H3(TpFPC) molecules at the submolecular level. We identify
a deviating adsorption behavior of H3(TpFPC) compared to
structurally similar porphyrins, characterized by a chiral pair of
molecule–substrate configurations.
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