Measurement of the conductance of a hydrogen molecule

By R. Smit, Y. Noat, C. Untiedt, N. D. Lang, M. Hemert, J. V. van Ruitenbeek. Nature, 2002

749 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent years have shown steady progress towards molecular electronics, in which molecules form basic components such as switches, diodes and electronic mixers. Often, a scanning tunnelling microscope is used to address an individual molecule, although this arrangement does not provide long-term stability. Therefore, metal–molecule–metal links using break-junction devices have also been explored; however, it is difficult to establish unambiguously that a single molecule forms the contact. Here we show that a single hydrogen molecule can form a stable bridge between platinum electrodes. In contrast to results for organic molecules, the bridge has a nearly perfect conductance of one quantum unit, carried by a single channel. The hydrogen bridge represents a simple test system in which to understand fundamental transport properties of single-molecule devices.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/069f3d98388f1d1cafd11613bc7016c0d71f4cce

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport (2019, methodology): “…junction by repeated indentation (e) I(t) or I(s) operation of STM (f) Lowtemperature UHV STM manipulation of individual molecules. ing an external vapor source (Kiguchi et al., 2008b; Smit et al., 2002) or employing a local cell for sublimation (Kaneko et al., 2013; Rakhmilevitch et al., 2014).”
Electron transport in molecular junctions (2006, methodology): “The single-molecule diode has been demonstrated in a molecule consisting of two weakly coupled conjugated units, using a mechanically controlled break-junction metho”
Electrical conduction through single molecules and self-assembled monolayers (2008, methodology): “This can be done by different methods; breaking the electrodes while molecules are present either in solution [91] or in the gas phase [96], or by adding a solution with the self-assembling molecules after the contacts are broken [94, 95].”
Electrostatic modification of novel materials (2006, background): “…microscopy STM Joachim et al., 1995; Yazdani, Eigler, and Lang, 1996; Datta et al., 1997; Stipe et al., 1998; Donhauser et al., 2001; Reichert et al., 2002; Smit et al., 2002 or conducting probe atomic force microscopy AFM Cui et al., 2001; Wold and Frisbie, 2001; Ramachandran et al., 2003 .”