Coronene and Bipyridine Derivatives Inducing Diversified Structural Transitions of Carboxylic Acids at the Liquid/Solid Interface

In recent years, the construction of stable multicomponent assembled structures on surfaces and the exploration of the assembled mechanism have become research hotspots. In this paper, the azobenzene-carboxylic acid called (E)-4’,4”’-(diazene-1,2-diyl) bis(([1,1’-biphenyl]-3,5-dicarboxylic acid)) (H4DBBD) could self-assemble into regular network structure at heptanoic acid/graphite via hydrogen bonding, and could be regulated into analogous kagomé network by coronene (COR) molecules. In addition, a series of bipyridine derivatives were further introduced to construct bi-component systems with H4DBBD molecules, and successfully induced diversified structural transitions of H4DBBD on the graphite surface. Combined with scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we have investigated the diversified structural transitions and analyzed the formation mechanism of the assembled systems.