Seminars Archive

Anatomy of Reproducible Single Molecule Circuits:Donor-Acceptor Link Motifs and Systematic Trends in Electronic Conductance

Abstract
Formation and function of well-defined linkages between organic molecules and metallic electrodes has been a key issue in the field of molecular electronics. We recently discovered that the conductance of single molecule junctions formed using gold-amine linkages can be measured reliably and reproducibly, enabling systematic measurements of trends with molecule length, conformation, conjugation and substituents. This has now proven to generalize to other links that form donor-acceptor bonds to gold. In this talk, I will present our current understanding of the properties and function of these links in single molecule conductance. Theory will be presented together with experiments performed by my collaborators at Columbia University (Venkataraman, et al.).