Abstract

The interest in studying organic nanostructures on surfaces emerges from their prospective applications in nanoscale electronic or optoelectronic devices, in which the spatially addressable functional units are to be assembled on the molecular level. By making use of molecular recognition processes based on non-covalent interactions, well-ordered 1D and 2D molecular structures can be formed on surfaces. Especially, the understanding of the interplay of the underlying inter-molecular and molecule substrate interactions are of great research interest since they are responsible for the structure formation. Only recently, on-surface reactions have been introduced for the creation of polymeric structures which feature improved stability and the prospect of improved conductivity – an advantage over non-covalently bound molecular assemblies.