- Liou, Franklin;
- Tsai, Hsin-Zon;
- Aikawa, Andrew S;
- Natividad, Kyler C;
- Tang, Eric;
- Ha, Ethan;
- Riss, Alexander;
- Watanabe, Kenji;
- Taniguchi, Takashi;
- Lischner, Johannes;
- Zettl, Alex;
- Crommie, Michael F
The spatial arrangement of adsorbates deposited onto a clean surface under vacuum typically cannot be reversibly tuned. Here we use scanning tunneling microscopy to demonstrate that molecules deposited onto graphene field-effect transistors (FETs) exhibit reversible, electrically tunable surface concentration. Continuous gate-tunable control over the surface concentration of charged F4TCNQ molecules was achieved on a graphene FET at T = 4.5K. This capability enables the precisely controlled impurity doping of graphene devices and also provides a new method for determining molecular energy level alignment based on the gate-dependence of molecular concentration. Gate-tunable molecular concentration is explained by a dynamical molecular rearrangement process that reduces total electronic energy by maintaining Fermi level pinning in the device substrate. The molecular surface concentration is fully determined by the device back-gate voltage, its geometric capacitance, and the energy difference between the graphene Dirac point and the molecular LUMO level.