Seleno groups control the energy-level alignment between conjugated organic molecules and metals.

The charge injection from metallic electrodes into hole transporting layers of organic devices often suffers from deviations from vacuum-level alignment at the interface. Even for weakly interacting cases, Pauli repulsion causes an interface dipole between the metal and conjugated organic molecules (COMs) (so called "push-back" or "cushion" effect), which leads notoriously to an increase of the hole injection barrier. On the other hand, for chalcogenol self assembled monolayers (SAMs) on metal surfaces, chemisorption via the formation of chalcogen-metal bonds is commonly observed. In these cases, the energy-level alignment is governed by chalcogen-derived interface states in the vicinity of the metal Fermi-level. In this work, we present X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy data that demonstrate that the interfacial energy-level alignment mechanism found for chalcogenol SAMs also applies to seleno-functionalized COMs. This can be exploited to mitigate the push-back effect at metal contacts, notably also when COMs with low ionization energies are employed, permitting exceedingly low hole injection barriers, as shown here for the interfaces of tetraseleno-tetracene with Au(111), Ag(111), and Cu(111).