Single-molecule circuits with well-defined molecular conductance.

By L. Venkataraman, Jennifer E. Klare, Iris W. Tam, C. Nuckolls, M. Hybertsen, M. Steigerwald. Nano letters (Print), 2006

701 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We measure the conductance of amine-terminated molecules by breaking Au point contacts in a molecular solution at room temperature. We find that the variability of the observed conductance for the diamine molecule-Au junctions is much less than the variability for diisonitrile- and dithiol-Au junctions. This narrow distribution enables unambiguous conductance measurements of single molecules. For an alkane diamine series with 2-8 carbon atoms in the hydrocarbon chain, our results show a systematic trend in the conductance from which we extract a tunneling decay constant of 0.91 +/- 0.03 per methylene group. We hypothesize that the diamine link binds preferentially to undercoordinated Au atoms in the junction. This is supported by density functional theory-based calculations that show the amine binding to a gold adatom with sufficient angular flexibility for easy junction formation but well-defined electronic coupling of the N lone pair to the Au. Therefore, the amine linkage leads to well-defined conductance measurements of a single molecule junction in a statistical study.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c28e34d8a03f3e80193fcc38a382fa43418b312

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Molecular transport junctions: vibrational effects (2006, background): “[89, 80, 127, 51, 128] Electrochemical gating[129] in such structures permits observations of different limits of transport, and the rich statistics obtainable from such measurements increase understanding of the transport spectroscopy.”
Electrical conduction through single molecules and self-assembled monolayers (2008, background): “The majority of the chemisorbed contacts are made by an Au–S bond on both sides of the molecule, but the Au–NH2 bonded molecules [63] are within the same low resistance group.”
Mechanically controlled binary conductance switching of a single-molecule junction. (2009, positive): “The conductance is measured by repeatedly forming and breaking gold point contacts with a modified scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in a solution of the molecules at room temperatur”