Pulling and Stretching a Molecular Wire to Tune its Conductance

Abstract

A scanning tunnelling microscope is used to pull a polythiophene wire from a Au(111) surface while measuring the current traversing the junction. Abrupt current increases measured during the lifting procedure are associated to the detachment of molecular sub-units, in apparent contradiction with the expected exponential decrease of the conductance with wire length. \textit{Ab initio} simulations reproduce the experimental data and demonstrate that this unexpected behavior is due to release of mechanical stress in the wire, paving the way to mechanically gated single-molecule electronic devices.

References in corpus (8)

• Dependence of Single Molecule Junction Conductance on Molecular Conformation
• Mechanically-Controlled Binary Conductance Switching of a Single-Molecule Junction
• Mechanical Control of Spin States in Spin-1 Molecules and the Underscreened Kondo Effect
• Magnetoresistance through a single molecule
• Resonant electron heating and molecular phonon cooling in single C${}_{60}$ junctions
• Passing current through touching molecules
• Oligothiophene nano-rings as electron resonators for whispering gallery modes
• Resonant heating and substrate-mediated cooling of a single C60 molecule in a tunnel junction

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport
• Perfect spin filtering by symmetry in molecular junctions
• Non-Hermitian Effects in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model: Exploring Substrate Coupling and Decoupling Dynamics
• Length-independent quantum transport through topological band states of graphene nanoribbons