Tunnelling in alkanes anchored to gold electrodes via amine end groups

Abstract

For investigation of electron transport on the nanoscale, a system possessing a simple to interpret electronic structure is composed of alkane chains bridging two electrodes via end groups; to date the majority of experiments and theoretical investigations on such structures have considered thiols bonding to gold electrodes. Recently experiments show that well defined molecular conductances may be resolved if the thiol end groups are replaced by amines. In this theoretical study, we investigate the bonding of amine groups to gold clusters and calculate electron transport across the resulting tunnel junctions. We find very good agreement with recent experiments for alkane diamines and discuss differences with respect to the alkane dithiol system.

9 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; to appear in Nanotechnology

References in corpus (3)

• Single-Molecule Circuits with Well-Defined Molecular Conductance
• Independent particle descriptions of tunneling from a many-body perspective
• Complex-band structure: a method to determine the off-resonant electron transport in oligomers

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Tunneling conductance of amine linked alkyl chains
• On a method to calculate conductance by means of the Wigner function: two critical tests
• Critical analysis of a variational method used to describe the molecular electron transport
• Reply to Comment on "Electron transport through correlated molecules computed using the time-independent Wigner function: Two critical tests''
• A multiconfigurational pair-density functional theory approach to molecular junctions