Construction and Structural Transformation of Metal-Organic Nanostructures Induced by Alkali Metals and Alkali Metal Salts

Metal-organic nanostructures are attractive in a variety of scientific fields, such as biomedicine, energy harvesting, and catalysis. Alkali-based metal-organic nanostructures have been extensively fabricated on surfaces based on pure alkali metals and alkali metal salts. However, their differences in the construction of alkali-based metal-organic nanostructures have been less discussed, and the influence on structural diversity remains elusive. In this work, from the interplay of scanning tunneling microscopy imaging and density functional theory calculations, we constructed Na-based metal-organic nanostructures by applying Na and NaCl as sources of alkali metals and visualized the structural transformations in real space. Moreover, a reverse structural transformation was achieved by dosing iodine into the Na-based metal-organic nanostructures, revealing the connections and differences between NaCl and Na in the structural evolutions, which provided fundamental insights into the evolution of electrostatic ionic interactions and the precise fabrication of alkali-based metal-organic nanostructures.