PAPER: Steering On-Surface Reactions by a Self-Assembly Approach
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, 56, 5026-5030, doi: 10.1002/anie.201700745
Chen, Q., Cramer, J. R., Liu, J., Jin, X., Liao, P., Shao, X., Gothelf, K. V., Wu, K.
BNLMS, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
Danish-Chinese Centre for Self-Assembly and Function of Molecular Nanostructures on Surfaces at iNANO and Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, 8000, Denmark.
School of Materials Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA.
Department of Chemical Physics, School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China.
Abstract
4,4'-Bis(2,6-difluoropyridin-4-yl)-1,1':4',1''-terphenyl (BDFPTP) molecules underwent dehydrocyclization and covalent coupling reactions on Au(111) according to scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) measurements and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Self-assembly of the reactants in well-defined molecular domains prior to reaction could greatly enhance the regioselectivity of the dehydrocyclization reaction and suppress defluorinated coupling, demonstrating that self-assembly can efficiently steer on-surface reactions. Such a strategy could be of great importance in surface chemistry and widely applied to control on-surface reactions.