Adsorption, desorption, and film formation of quinacridone and its thermal cracking product indigo on clean and carbon-covered silicon dioxide surfaces.

The evaporation of quinacridone from a stainless steel Knudsen cell leads to the partial decomposition of this molecule in the cell, due to its comparably high sublimation temperature. At least one additional type of molecules, namely indigo, could be detected in the effusion flux. Thermal desorption spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy have been used to study the co-deposition of these molecules on sputter-cleaned and carbon-covered silicon dioxide surfaces. Desorption of indigo appears at temperatures of about 400 K, while quinacridone desorbs at around 510 K. For quinacridone, a desorption energy of 2.1 eV and a frequency factor for desorption of 1 × 10(19) s(-1) were calculated, which in this magnitude is typical for large organic molecules. A fraction of the adsorbed quinacridone molecules (∼5%) decomposes during heating, nearly independent of the adsorbed amount, resulting in a surface composed of small carbon islands. The sticking coefficients of indigo and quinacridone were found to be close to unity on a carbon covered SiO2 surface but significantly smaller on a sputter-cleaned substrate. The reason for the latter can be attributed to insufficient energy dissipation for unfavorably oriented impinging molecules. However, due to adsorption via a hot-precursor state, the sticking probability is increased on the surface covered with carbon islands, which act as accommodation centers.