Gate Controlled Molecular Switch Based on Picene/F4TCNQ Charge-Transfer Material

Abstract

We show that the recently synthesized charge-transfer material picene/F4TCNQ can be used as a gate-voltage controlled molecular switch. The picene/F4TCNQ system is compared with the extensive characterized anthraquinone-based molecular system, which is known to exhibit large switching ratios due to quantum interference effects. In case of picene/F4TCNQ we find switching ratios larger by one order of magnitude. Further, our calculations reveal that the picene/F4TCNQ system resembles remarkable well the I-V characteristics of a classical diode. The reverse-bias current of this molecular diode can be increased two orders of magnitude by an external gate voltage. Based on density-functional theory calculations we show that the hybrid states formed by the picene/F4TCNQ system are playing the key role to determine the transport properties. We further conclude that the tuning of quantum transport properties through hybrid states is a general concept which opens a new route towards functional materials for molecular electronics.

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Quantum Interference in Molecular Charge Transport
• Resonant electron heating and molecular phonon cooling in single C${}_{60}$ junctions
• Electrochemical control of quantum interference in anthraquinone-based molecular switches
• Ab-initio non-equilibrium quantum transport and forces with the real space projector augmented wave method

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Electronic structure and transport properties of coupled CdS/ZnSe quantum dots