Bistable molecular conductors with a field-switchable dipole group

Abstract

A class of bistable "stator-rotor" molecules is proposed, where a stationary bridge (stator) connects the two electrodes and facilitates electron transport between them. The rotor part, which has a large dipole moment, is attached to an atom of the stator via a single sigma bond. Hydrogen bonds formed between the rotor and stator make the symmetric orientation of the dipole unstable. The rotor has two potential minima with equal energy for rotation about the sigma bond. The dipole orientation, which determines the conduction state of the molecule, can be switched by an external electric field that changes the relative energy of the two potential minima. Both orientation of the rotor correspond to asymmetric current-voltage characteristics that are the reverse of each other, so they are distinguishable electrically. Such bistable stator-rotor molecules could potentially be used as parts of molecular electronic devices.

8 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Current rectification by molecules with asymmetric tunneling barriers

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Smallest Molecular Switch
• Density functional calculations of nanoscale conductance
• Current hysteresis and memory effect in a molecular quantum dot with strong electron-vibron interaction
• Interference and k-point sampling in the supercell approach to phase-coherent transport
• Molecular switch controlled by pulsed bias voltages
• First-principles study of phenyl ethylene oligomers as current-switch
• Current rectification in molecular junctions produced by local potential fields
• Ab initio study of single molecular transistor modulated by gate-bias
• Electronic transport properties of indolyl spirooxazine/merooxazine-based light-driven molecular switch: The effect of amino/nitro substituents
• Tunneling of electrons via rotor-stator molecular interfaces: combined ab initio and model study