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The Environment-Dependent Behavior of the Blatter Radical at the Metal–Molecule Interface

Author(s):

Jonathan Z. Low, Gregor Kladnik, Laerte L. Patera, Sophia Sokolov, Giacomo Lovat, Elango Kumarasamy, Jascha Repp, Luis M. Campos, Dean Cvetko, Alberto Morgante, Latha Venkataraman

Journal:

Nano Letters

Year:

2019

Volume:

19

Pages

2543–2548

DOI:

10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b00275

Abstract:

Stable organic radicals have potential applications for building organic spintronic devices. To fulfill this potential, the interface between organic radicals and metal electrodes must be well characterized. Here, through a combined effort that includes synthesis, scanning tunneling microscopy, X-ray spectroscopy, and single-molecule conductance measurements, we comprehensively probe the electronic interaction between gold metal electrodes and a benchtop stable radical—the Blatter radical. We find that despite its open-shell character and having a half-filled orbital close to the Fermi level, the radical is stable on a gold substrate under ultrahigh vacuum. We observe a Kondo resonance arising from the radical and spectroscopic signatures of its half-filled orbitals. By contrast, in solution-based single-molecule conductance measurements, the radical character is lost through oxidation with charge transfer occurring from the molecule to metal. Our experiments show that the stability of radical states can be very sensitive to the environment around the molecule.

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