Initial steps of rubicene film growth on silicon dioxide

The film growth of the conjugated organic molecule rubicene on silicon dioxide was studied in detail. Since no structural data of the condensed material were available, we first produced high quality single crystals from solution and determined the crystal structure. This high purity material was used to prepare ultrathin films under ultrahigh vacuum conditions, by physical vapor deposition. Thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS) was applied to delineate the adsorption and desorption kinetics. It could be shown that the initial sticking coefficient is only 0.2 ± 0.05, but the sticking coefficient increases with increasing coverage. TDS further revealed that first a closed, weakly bound bilayer develops (wetting layer), which dewets after further deposition of rubicene, leading to an island-like layer. These islands are crystalline and exhibit the same structure as the solution grown crystals. The orientation of the crystallites is with the (001) plane parallel to the substrate. A dewetting of the closed bilayer was also observed when the film was exposed to air. Furthermore, Ostwald ripening of the island-like film takes place under ambient conditions, leading to films composed of few, large crystallites. From TDS, we determined the heat of evaporation from the multilayer islands to be 1.47 eV, whereas the desorption energy from the first layer is only 1.25 eV.