Static Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Images Reveal the Mechanism of Supramolecular Polymerization of an Oligopyridine on Graphite

Abstract

Supramolecular polymerization of a donoracceptor bisterpyridine (BTP) equipped with an electron-rich carbazole unit is observed by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) at the highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) j solution interface. It is shown that two-dimensional crystals of supramolecular (co)polymers are formed by chain growth polymerization, which in turn can be described by copolymerization statistics. From concentration-dependent measurements, derived copolymerization parameters and DFT calculations, a mechanism for self-assembly is developed that suggests a kinetically driven polymerization process in combination with thermodynamically controlled crystallization.

Counting Molecules: Python based scheme for automated enumeration and categorization of molecules in scanning tunneling microscopy images

“…Extracting statistics from STM images is often done by hand [3,4,5,6]. This necessarily limits the size and complexity of statistical problems that can be tackled using these datasets.…”