Revealing the high-resolution structures and electronic properties of ZnTPP and its derivatives formed by thermally induced cyclodehydrogenation on Au(111)

Zinc(II) tetraphenylporphyrin (ZnTPP) has very broad application prospects in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, solar cells and nanomaterials. In this paper, by using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), we systematically investigated the ZnTPP molecule and its four derivatives formed by thermal annealing were characterized unambiguously by bond-resolved STM (BR-STM). The electronic properties of the ZnTPP molecule and its four cyclodehydrogenation products were investigated by scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) combined with DFT calculations. The spatial distribution of molecular frontier orbitals of four products was obtained by dI/dV mappings. This work gives rise to a full-scale investigation of ZnTPP on Au(111), which will be potentially useful in nanodevices and optoelectronics.