Foregoing rigidity to achieve greater intimacy.

Interactions between the surfaces of planar and nonplanar molecules have generated considerable interest in materials chemistry as critical elements for understanding twodimensional supramolecular assembly, molecular and chiral recognition, and heterogeneous catalysis. Carbon-rich balland bowl-shaped polyaromatic molecules, such as fullerenes and fullerene fragments or buckybowls, figure prominently in these studies. Fullerenes have been found to form solid constructs with planar metalloporphyrins with remarkably close contacts but without the need for matching their convex and concave faces. Molecular self-organization of nonplanar polyaromatic bowls on a planar metal surface introduces the interesting additional factor of symmetry mismatch. Studies of ordered structures formed by weakly bound corannulene, C20H10, on the Cu(110) surface examined by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) have revealed interesting insights into their molecular interactions. However, the overall effect of these interactions on the geometry of the corannulene bowl could not be evaluated by the STM method. In this work, we selected a system that allowed us to investigate the mutual structural influences of bowl-shaped polyarenes and a planar polynuclear metal unit upon their attractive interaction (Figure 1). Curving of the planar