Formation of a regular fullerene nanochain lattice

A vicinal Au(11 12 12) surface, naturally patterned into a rectangular superlattice, has been used as a template to prepare C-60 nanostructures with long-range order and uniform size. At a coverage of 0.1 monolayer and at room temperature, a two-dimensional long-range ordered superlattice of molecular nanochains is achieved, which perfectly replicates the periodicity of the template surface. The fullerene nanochains are found to be located exclusively on the face-centered cubic stacking domains at the lower step edges. Our experiments demonstrate that highly periodic molecular nanochains can be fabricated through a site-selective anchoring method.