Y6 is a high-performance non-fullerene acceptor widely used in organic solar cells. The assembly behavior of Y6 at interfaces, however, remains mostly unknown and respective in-depth investigations are missing. Here, we use room temperature scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the self-assembly of Y6 at the solid-liquid interface. We show how coadsorption of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon donor molecules leads to the formation of a series of donor-acceptor interfacial cocrystals with tailored molecular structure and order on a graphite surface. The gained understanding of the intricate interplay of the underlying intermolecular interactions should facilitate the engineering of multicomponent interfacial nanostructures and help to potentially improve charge separation and transport in organic (opto)electronic devices.
We report second harmonic generation (SHG) electric field triplet interferometry performed using three mutually coherent ultrafast pulses in a common path with controllable relative phases, namely, the light fields of a sample signal (SI), a reference oscillator (RO), and a local oscillator (LO). The ROLO phase determined from the interference of the light fields produced by two quartz wafers is subtracted from the phase determined from the SIROLO interferogram to yield the signal phase, ϕSI. The new method also calibrates the measured SHG intensity from a given sample internally by sending the fundamental light field reflected from the sample into one of the quartz wafers in the ROLO element. The approach avoids having to exchange the sample against a reference material with a known χ(2) value or known phase and accounts on-the-fly for situations where the reflected fundamental light field intensity changes with experimental conditions. The new method is successfully benchmarked against z-cut α-quartz, fused silica held at its point of zero charge, and hematite nanolayers in air, across three different interferometers. The approach should be applicable for other second-order nonlinear spectroscopies, such as vibrational or electronic sum-frequency generation.

