Electrically addressing the spin of a magnetic porphyrin through covalently connected graphene electrodes

Abstract

We report on the fabrication and transport characterization of atomically-precise single molecule devices consisting of a magnetic porphyrin covalently wired by graphene nanoribbon electrodes. The tip of a scanning tunneling microscope was utilized to contact the end of a GNR-porphyrin-GNR hybrid system and create a molecular bridge between tip and sample for transport measurements. Electrons tunneling through the suspended molecular heterostructure excited the spin multiplet of the magnetic porphyrin. The detachment of certain spin-centers from the surface shifted their spin-carrying orbitals away from an on-surface mixed-valence configuration, recovering its original spin state. The existence of spin-polarized resonances in the free-standing systems and their electrical addressability is the fundamental step for utilization of carbon-based materials as functional molecular spintronics systems.

References in corpus (2)

• Mechanical Control of Spin States in Spin-1 Molecules and the Underscreened Kondo Effect
• Substrate-Independent Growth of Atomically Precise Chiral Graphene Nanoribbons

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Designing a mechanically driven spin-crossover molecular switch via organic embedding
• Proposal for all-electrical spin manipulation and detection for a single molecule on boron-substituted graphene
• Tunable Current Rectification Through a Designer Graphene Nanoribbon
• Robust quantum engineering of current flow in carbon nanostructures at room temperature
• Independent and coherent transitions between antiferromagnetic states of few-molecule systems