Tunable control efficiency of patterned nucleation by post-annealing

Post-annealing was conducted to investigate the control efficiency of template-directed growth of organic molecules. Disordered organic patterns can be converted to ordered ones via elimination of randomly distributed molecular islands by annealing, resulting in full control of organic molecules on templates with tunable spacing. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations revealed that the strong interaction between the molecule and the template plays a key role in tuning the control efficiency. With this method, direct growth of multicolor patterns is demonstrated.