On-Surface Synthesis and Characterization of 9-Atom Wide Armchair Graphene Nanoribbons

The bottom-up approach to synthesize graphene nanoribbons strives not only to introduce a band gap into the electronic structure of graphene but also to accurately tune its value by designing both the width and edge structure of the ribbons with atomic precision. We report the synthesis of an armchair graphene nanoribbon with a width of nine carbon atoms on Au(111) through surface-assisted aryl–aryl coupling and subsequent cyclodehydrogenation of a properly chosen molecular precursor. By combining high-resolution atomic force microscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy, and Raman spectroscopy, we demonstrate that the atomic structure of the fabricated ribbons is exactly as designed. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and Fourier-transformed scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveal an electronic band gap of 1.4 eV and effective masses of ≈0.1 me for both electrons and holes, constituting a substantial improvement over previous efforts toward the development of transistor applications. We use ab initio calculations to gain insight into the dependence of the Raman spectra on excitation wavelength as well as to rationalize the symmetry-dependent contribution of the ribbons’ electronic states to the tunneling current. We propose a simple rule for the visibility of frontier electronic bands of armchair graphene nanoribbons in scanning tunneling spectroscopy.