Self‐Assembly of Organic Semiconductors on Strained Graphene under Strain‐Induced Pseudo‐Electric Fields

Abstract Graphene is used as a growth template for van der Waals epitaxy of organic semiconductor (OSC) thin films. During the synthesis and transfer of chemical‐vapor‐deposited graphene on a target substrate, local inhomogeneities in the graphene—in particular, a nonuniform strain field in the graphene template—can easily form, causing poor morphology and crystallinity of the OSC thin films. Moreover, a strain field in graphene introduces a pseudo‐electric field in the graphene. Here, the study investigates how the strain and strain‐induced pseudo‐electric field of a graphene template affect the self‐assembly of π‐conjugated organic molecules on it. Periodically strained graphene templates are fabricated by transferring graphene onto an array of nanospheres and then analyzed the growth and nucleation behavior of C₆₀ thin films on the strained graphene templates. Both experiments and a numerical simulation demonstrated that strained graphene reduced the desorption energy between the graphene and the C₆₀ molecules and thereby suppressed both nucleation and growth of the C₆₀. A mechanism is proposed in which the strain‐induced pseudo‐electric field in graphene modulates the binding energy of organic molecules on the graphene.