To better understand the chemical nature of the molecules on the Au(111) surface and to confirm the proposed models for the different nanostructures observed at RT, Figure shows a set of XPS spectra for the F 1s, I 3d and C 1s core level peaks, while Table presents the main parameters of the different components obtained from the fit analysis. The F 1s signal exhibits a single emission located at BE = 686.1 eV, corresponding to the F-B bond within the molecule . In contrast, the I 3d spectrum is composed of two contributions: the main one (3d5/2 at BE = 620.6 eV) corresponds to iodine in the I-BOPHY-I molecule, while the less intense emission, at BE = 619.3 eV, is assigned to iodine on the surface after partial molecular dehalogenation, in good agreement with literature . Therefore, the larger contribution (purple curve) is ascribed to iodine present in the pristine molecules of the majority ordered phase and at the ends of the dimers. The smaller one (orange curve) corresponds to the iodine atoms detached from the molecules and stabilized on the metallic surface. Finally, the C 1s XPS emission shows four different components corresponding to the different chemical environments of the carbon atoms within the BOPHY core, i.e. C-C/C-H at 284.5 eV, C-I at 284.9, C-N at 285.1 eV and C=N at 285.8 eV. These results bring up two important conclusions: i) the I-BOPHY-I molecules arrive intact to the Au(111) surface with only a small fraction (16%) displaying a partial dehalogenation, probably due to molecular dehalogenation at more reactive surface sites (step edges and/or reconstruction elbows); ii) the amount of dehalogenated molecules inferred from the XPS analysis fits well with the proportion of metal-coordinated (I-BOPHY-Au-BOPHY-I) vs self-assembled nanostructures observed by STM, thus corroborating our models.