Journal
NANOSCALE RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 13, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
SPRINGEROPEN
DOI: 10.1186/s11671-018-2528-z
Keywords
Electron transport; Barrier height; Single molecular junction; Iodine; Alkyl-based molecules
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [21573198, 21273204, 21406137]
- Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China [LR15B030002]
- Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai [17ZR1447100]
- Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning
- Key Laboratory of Spectrochemical Analysis & Instrumentation (Xiamen University), Ministry of Education [SCAI1604]
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One key issue for the development of molecular electronic devices is to understand the electron transport of single-molecule junctions. In this work, we explore the electron transport of iodine-terminated alkane single molecular junctions using the scanning tunneling microscope-based break junction approach. The result shows that the conductance decreases exponentially with the increase of molecular length with a decay constant beta(N) = 0.5 per -CH2 (or 4 nm(-1)). Importantly, the tunneling decay of those molecular junctions is much lower than that of alkane molecules with thiol, amine, and carboxylic acid as the anchoring groups and even comparable to that of the conjugated oligophenyl molecules. The low tunneling decay is attributed to the small barrier height between iodine-terminated alkane molecule and Au, which is well supported by DFT calculations. The work suggests that the tunneling decay can be effectively tuned by the anchoring group, which may guide the manufacturing of molecular wires.
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