Submonolayer Crystalline Tetracene Film Formation by Vapor-Liquid-Solid Deposition.

Over the last several decades, studies of submonolayer nucleation and growth kinetics by vacuum deposition have produced a sophisticated understanding of the connections between structural film properties such as island size distributions, island density, inter-island spacing statistics, nucleation and growth rates, with underlying atomistic process of monomer deposition, diffusion, and aggregation. By comparison, the comparable theoretical understanding of polycrystalline films formed in liquid solvent environments is much less well developed. Here~we present studies into the early stage nucleation and growth kinetics of organic molecular films of tetracene prepared by a vapor-liquid-solid deposition technique in which tetracene monomers are delivered at a constant rate via a vapor-phase flux to a substrate coated with a sub-micron thick layer of an organic liquid solvent, causing crystals to nucleate and grow. We use in-situ, real-time fluorescence videomicroscopy to follow the formation and growth of individual crystals, including simultaneous spatial mapping of the monomer concentration and depletion zones.