Shai
Mangel
a,
Maxim
Skripnik
bc,
Katharina
Polyudov
a,
Christian
Dette
a,
Tobias
Wollandt
a,
Paul
Punke
a,
Dongzhe
Li
c,
Roberto
Urcuyo‡
a,
Fabian
Pauly
bc,
Soon Jung
Jung
*a and
Klaus
Kern
ad
aMax Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Heisenbergstrasse 1, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany. E-mail: s.jung@fkf.mpg.de; Tel: +49-711-689-5249
bOkinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
cDepartment of Physics, University of Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany
dInstitute de Physique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
First published on 25th February 2020
The electric field is an important parameter to vary in a single-molecule experiment, because it can directly affect the charge distribution around the molecule. Yet, performing such an experiment with a well-defined electric field for a model chemical reaction at an interface has proven to be extremely difficult. Here, by combining a graphene field-effect transistor and a gate-tunable scanning tunneling microscope (STM), we reveal how this strategy enables the intramolecular H atom transfer of a metal-free macrocycle to be controlled with an external field. Experiments and theory both elucidate how the energetic barrier to tautomerization decreases with increasing electric field. The consistency between the two results demonstrates the potential in using electric fields to engineer molecular switching mechanisms that are ubiquitous in nanoscale electronic devices.
Recent advances in the synthesis, characterization and computational modeling of catalytic materials have inspired detailed predictions and verifications of electric field effects therein,5,8,9,15–17 but extant technical challenges still remain to be overcome.4 Unlike theoretical modelling, in an experiment it is not possible to set the surface electric field to any arbitrary value, nor always have a well-defined field. For instance, since the orientation and magnitude of the local electric field can vary significantly from one adsorption site to another on a surface, its overall effect on catalytic activity can be challenging to predict. Furthermore, due to the complex morphology of catalytic surfaces and the lack of surface-sensitive experimental techniques specifically adapted to them, it is extremely difficult to characterize surface electric fields and their effect on chemical reactions.4 Fortunately, in both these aspects, STM contributes enormously due to its ability to apply oriented electric fields to adsorbed molecules and to detect the resulting effects at the atomic level. In particular, the sharp apex of an STM tip can sustain very high electric fields (|E| ≈ 1 V nm−1) with low applied tip-substrate bias voltages (|Vb| ≈ 1 V). The ability to produce a high electric field in combination with precisely adjustable parameters makes STM-based methods ideal for testing the effects of electric fields on single-molecule reactions in a spatially resolved way.
Argonès et al. reported an STM characterization of an electric-field-induced Diels–Alder reaction, where a diene, covalently bonded to a gold tip, was brought into contact with a dienophile-covered substrate.17 The electric-field-induced chemical-bonding events were detectable by measuring the electric current. Alemani et al. noted similar effects that involved the isomerization of azobenzene under varying electric field conditions.18 Recently, STM tip induced electric field is shown to catalyze the cis-to -trans isomerization of cumulenes in solution.19
A drawback of STM for studying electric-field effects is the inseparability of its control parameters. Since only two of the three factors (tip-sample distance, bias voltage and tunneling current) can be varied independently, it is not easy to identify system responses that are directly attributable to electric-field effects alone. Here, we overcome this challenge by combining a graphene field-effect transistor with a gate-tunable STM. This combination enables an applied back-gate voltage to change the charge-carrier density on the graphene surface, which in turn varies the tip height in constant-current mode. In other words, the back-gating enables changing the tip-induced electric field without varying the set-point current and set-point voltage. Using this method, we observe the impact of the electric field on the tautomerization reaction of metal-free phthalocyanine (H2Pc) deposited onto these back-gated graphene devices at a temperature of 5 K. We show that an increase of the absolute magnitude of the applied electric field leads to an increase in the reaction rate, which we attribute to a decrease in the activation barrier. The activation barrier is found to scale linearly with the applied electric field, which offers the possibility to control tautomerization reactions at the molecular level.
Fig. 1 Schematic of the method used to control the tip-induced electric field without varying the set-point current and voltage. |
The ability to control the external electric field without varying the set-point current and voltage was applied to investigate the electric-field effect on the hydrogen-transfer reaction of H2Pc. H2Pc is a planar π-conjugated molecule with D2h symmetry. As shown in Fig. 2a, H2Pc undergoes a tautomerization reaction in which two hydrogen atoms hop between four nitrogen atoms in the cavity, switching between two different trans conformations. The tautomerization in H2Pc can be triggered by an STM-induced electronic excitation process at 5 K.26–29 According to DFT calculations (Fig. 2b), the highest occupied molecular orbitals (HOMOs) of both tautomers exhibit almost identical spatial shapes, and thus cannot be used to detect the position of the hydrogen atoms in the cavity or, in other words, to infer the state of the tautomerization of the molecule. The inset of Fig. 2c shows an STM image of H2Pc taken at the molecule's HOMO resonance. Despite of a continuous change of the tautomerization state of the molecule during recording, the HOMO can be clearly recognized due to the theoretically predicted indistinguishability of the computed HOMOs. On the other hand, the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) has twofold symmetry (Fig. 2b). Thus, when we rotate the LUMO of one tautomer by 90°, it becomes equivalent to the LUMO of the other tautomer. The LUMO can hence be used to detect the position of hydrogen atoms inside the molecular cavity.
All the measurements were taken at a bias voltage of Vb = 1.6 V, which is high enough to induce the tautomerization but also low enough to ensure the stability of the tip during the measurements.29 The tunnelling current was kept at 10 pA in all experiments. Since the tautomerization is faster than the STM scanning rate, when the H2Pc molecules were imaged, the superposition of the LUMOs of the different tautomers appears as an octothorpe in the molecular cavity (Fig. 2c). Thus, the tautomeric state is still obscured even though the LUMOs of the two tautomers are in principle, distinguishable. Nevertheless, the change in the local density of states (LDOS) due to the tautomerization reaction can be easily detected in a current–time trace as a two-level telegraphic noise recorded at a fixed lateral position in constant-height mode. These fluctuations originate from the tautomerization itself, whose high- and low-conductance states can be assigned to the two tautomeric forms of H2Pc.
Since the rate of the tautomerization reaction strongly depends on the position of the electron injection into the molecule,26 we measured the switching rates at various positions over the H2Pc molecule. To achieve a sufficiently low dispersion in the measured switching rate, we chose to perform them at an empirically determined location that maximizes the number of switching events (black dot in Fig. 2c). After the tip location was set in constant-current mode, the feedback loop was disabled to measure the reaction rate of the tautomerization by recording a current–time trace in constant-height mode (Fig. 2d and SI 1, ESI†).
Due to the spatial dependence of the switching rate, the molecules were rescanned following each measurement to verify that the tip remained at the predetermined position above the molecule. The reaction rate was then measured as a function of the applied gate voltage (Vg) (SI 2, ESI†), as shown in Fig. 3a. The experiment was then repeated for several different molecules. All these reaction rates were normalized with respect to their maximum value to reduce the influence of any local surface corrugation or impurities that create “charge-puddles” below the molecules30 and perturb the measured reaction rate (see SI 3, ESI†). The maximum reaction rate is attained when no gate voltage is applied (Vg = 0 V). We expect that the electric field applied between the tip and sample is around E = 2.2 V nm−1 at Vg = 0 V, based on the simple plate–capacitor model (see the discussion in SI 5, ESI†). The reaction rate decreases symmetrically with increasing |Vg| (Fig. 3a). The reaction rate exhibits an inverse correlation with the tip-molecule distance (Fig. 3b and SI 4, ESI†). Since sweeping the gate voltage is equivalent to shifting the Fermi energy with respect to the Dirac point, the changes in the tip height Δz as a function of the applied gate voltage are correlated with the DOS of the underlying graphene (inset in Fig. 3b). The modification of the electric field (ΔE) was derived from the change in the tip height (see the discussion in SI 5, ESI†). The correlation between the reaction rate and the changes in the electric field induced by the tip is clearly visible in Fig. 3c, where the reaction rate decreases when the tip-induced electric field is reduced. The gap in the electric-field spectrum at −0.2 V nm−1 < ΔE < 0 V nm−1 for Vg < 0 originates from a jump in the tip position around Vg = 0 V when sweeping towards negative gating values (see Fig. 3b).
To understand the role of the applied electric field on the reaction rate, we employed DFT calculations. The minimum-energy path (MEP) for hydrogen transfer in the molecule is shown in Fig. 4a. The DFT calculations predict that this transfer occurs through one of the cis states, regardless of whether the molecule is in the gas phase or on graphene. A direct transition that bypasses the cis state contributes negligibly due to its prohibitively high energy barrier (SI 6, ESI†). A transition complex between the trans and cis states exists with an intermediate-state energy Einter that defines the activation energy Ea for the tautomerization reaction with respect to the initial energy Etrans, i.e., Ea = Einter − Etrans. Using this definition, the calculated activation barrier is 487 meV (11.23 kcal mol−1). The activation barrier is lower than the value of previous report, 622 meV (14.34 kcal mol−1). The difference can be attributed to the differences in the ab initio approaches (SI 6, ESI†).
We studied the activation energy as a function of the magnitude of the electric field. The direction of the applied electric field is defined by the tilting angle α between the electric field and the normal vector of the molecule's plane (Fig. 4b). When the electric field is applied perpendicular to the molecule's plane (α = 0), the energy variation due to electric field is negligible. However, considering the corrugation of the graphene surface, molecules generally experience an electric field from different tilting angles (Fig. 4c and SI 7, ESI†). As we increase α, the electric field effect on the activation barrier becomes increasingly pronounced (Fig. 4b and SI 8, ESI†). This calculated strong dependence on α explains the variation in the absolute value of the reaction rates across different molecules (Fig. S 3, ESI†). In addition, theory predicts that an applied electric field reduces the activation barrier. This is consistent with the experimental observations in Fig. 3c that the reaction rate drops as the electric field is reduced due to an increased tip height. In other words, an applied electric field of increasing magnitude reduces the activation barrier and increases the reaction rate.
To verify our conclusions, we also calculated the direct influence of accumulated charges on the hydrogen transfer. Our simulations predict that the activation barrier typically decreases as the absolute value of the accumulated charge increases at a constant electric field (SI 10, ESI†), which would correspond to an increase of the reaction rate with |Vg|. This is in contradiction to the experimental trends, and from this analysis we therefore conclude that the effect of accumulated charge alone cannot account for the observed change of reaction rate. Additionally, we examined molecular energy level shifts in relation to the applied gate voltage (SI 11, ESI†). This was done because the alignment of molecular levels with respect to the graphene substrate can be tuned through Vg, which in turn affects the number of injected electrons that activate the tautomerization reaction. The calculations show that the molecular energy levels shift monotonically when the applied back-gate voltage is increased from −40 V to +40 V. Since the reaction rate decreases symmetrically around Vg = 0 V (see Fig. 3c), the energy level shift also cannot account for the changes of reaction rate observed in the experiment. To summarize, experimentally we observe the change of the tautomerization reaction rate as a function of gate voltage. By examining theoretically the roles of electric field, accumulated charge and molecular energy shifts that occur in the system, we find that the independent variable that best explains the functional dependence is the electric field. We note that our theoretical modelling does not account for inhomogeneous distributions of the electric field or charge. We expect that such inhomogeneities due to the tip geometry or surface defects will lead to non-vanishing tilt angles α on the H2Pc molecules and thus enhance the tilting effects of surface corrugation.
Footnotes |
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c9cp06868f |
‡ Present address: Centro de Electroquímica y Energía Química (CELEQ) and Escuela de Química, Universidad de Costa Rica, 11501-2060, San José, Costa Rica. |
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