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CBC News science specialist Darius Mahdavi takes a tour of UBC's Quantum Matter Institute to learn more about quantum science and how many of the experiments being done there could launch science and humanity into the unknown.

As an organic semiconductor and a prototypical acceptor molecule in organic photovoltaics, C60 has broad relevance to the world of organic thin film electronics. Although highly uniform C60 thin films are necessary to conduct spectroscopic analysis of the electronic structure of these C60-based materials, reported C60 films show a relatively low degree of order beyond a monolayer. Here, we develop a generalizable two-stage growth technique that consistently produces single-domain C60 films of controllable thicknesses, using Au(111) as an epitaxially well-matched substrate. We characterize the films using low-energy electron diffraction, low-energy electron microscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy, and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). We report highly oriented epitaxial film growth of C60/Au(111) from 1 monolayer (ML) up to 20 ML films. The high-quality of the C60 thin films enables the direct observation of the electronic dispersion of the HOMO and HOMO–1 bands via ARPES without need for small spot sizes. Our results indicate a path for the growth of organic films on metallic substrates with long-range ordering.