Though generally considered insulating, recent progress on the discovery of conductive porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) offers new opportunities for their integration as electroactive components in electronic devices. Compared to classical semiconductors, these metal-organic hybrids combine the crystallinity of inorganic materials with easier chemical functionalization and processability. Still, future development depends on the ability to produce high-quality films with fine control over their orientation, crystallinity, homogeneity, and thickness. Here self-assembled monolayer substrate modification and bottom-up techniques are used to produce preferentially oriented, ultrathin, conductive films of Cu-CAT-1. The approach permits to fabricate and study the electrical response of MOF-based devices incorporating the thinnest MOF film reported thus far (10 nm thick).

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Organic spintronics is a new emerging field that promises to offer the full potential of chemistry to spintronics, as for example high versatility through chemical engineering and simple low cost processing. However, one key challenge that remains to be unlocked for further applications is the high incompatibility between spintronics key materials such as high Curie temperature Co, Ni, Fe (and their alloys) and wet chemistry. Indeed, the transition metal proneness to oxidation has so far hampered the integration of wet chemistry processes into the development of room temperature organic spintronics devices. As a result, they had mainly to rely on high vacuum physical processes, restraining the choice of available organic materials to a small set of sublimable molecules. In this letter, focusing on cobalt as an example, we show a wet chemistry method to easily and selectively recover a metallic surface from an air exposed oxidized surface for further integration into spintronics devices. The oxide etching process, using a glycolic acid based solution, proceeds without increasing the surface roughness and allows the retrieval of an oxygen-free chemically active cobalt layer. This unlocks the full potential of wet chemistry processes towards room temperature molecular spintronics with transition metals electrodes. We demonstrate this by the grafting of alkylthiols self-assembled monolayers on recovered oxidized cobalt surfaces. C 2015 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. [http://dx.

Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) are nowadays broadly used as surface protectors or modifiers and play a key role in many technological applications. This has motivated the study of their formation in all kind of materials; however, and despite the current interest in molecular spintronics, the study of SAMs on ferromagnetic surfaces remains almost unexplored. In this paper, we report for the first time a methodology for the formation of SAMs of n-alkylphosphonic acids on permalloy in ambient conditions. The formed monolayers have been fully characterized by means of contact angle measurements, atomic force microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, matrix assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry, infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy, and X-ray reflectometry. Additionally, the magnetic stability of the modified permalloy after the solution process required for the SAM formation has been confirmed by magneto-optical Kerr effect magnetometry. Moreover, by means of microcontact printing lithography, very accurate SAM patterns have been transferred onto permalloy surfaces and used as resist mask in a chemical etching process giving rise to submicrometric permalloy surface patterns with potential interest in nanomagnetism, spintronics, and storage technologies.