Competitive adsorption and dynamics of guest molecules in 2D molecular sieves

The nanoporous network formed by 1,3,5-tris(10-carboxydecyloxy) benzene (TCDB) was used as the host nanoporous network. It has been identified that a variety of guest molecules (such as triphenylene, 1-phenyloctane and copper(II) phthalocyanine (CuPc)) can be dispersed in this template to form binary supramolecular architectures, which were studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). It is interesting to observe that the host network can adjust itself in response to the molecular size and shape of the guest, and the guest molecules can be excluded by some other guest molecules. The dynamics of CuPc molecules entrapped in TCDB is reported. The STM images as well as the density-functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the guest selectivity depends not only on geometry of guest molecules, but also on their adsorption energy in host networks.