Epitaxial etching of organic single crystals

Abstract Organic single crystals (OSCs) have received increasing interest in the last decades for their potential applications in flexible electronics. Although there are various subtractive manufacturing methods of organic electronics, the subtractive manufacturing of OSCs is still a challenge, since OSCs are assembled via weak van-der-Waals interactions which are vulnerable and cannot afford damages and suffer the degradation of performances after the process. Here, we develop an epitaxial etching strategy which clips the OSCs and keeps high-quality crystalline nature of the resulting materials. As a result, high-quality organic micro-ribbon arrays are fabricated which maintains 89% charge mobility in average compared with original OSCs, showing great potential of this subtractive manufacturing method in future organic electronics.