Highly-effective gating of single-molecule junctions: an electrochemical approach

We report an electrochemical gating approach with similar to 100% efficiency to tune the conductance of single-molecule 4,40' bipyridine junctions using scanning-tunnelling-microscopy break junction technique. Density functional theory calculation suggests that electrochemical gating aligns molecular frontier orbitals relative to the electrode Fermi level, switching the molecule from an off resonance state to partial'' resonance.