Silicon Ring Strain Creates High-Conductance Pathways in Single-Molecule Circuits
摘要:
Here we demonstrate for the first time that strained silanes couple directly to gold electrodes in break-junction conductance measurements. We find that strained silicon molecular wires terminated by alkyl sulfide aurophiles behave effectively as single-molecule parallel circuits with competing sulfur-to-sulfur (low G) and sulfur-to-silacycle (high G) pathways. We can switch off the high conducting sulfur-to-silacycle pathway by altering the environment of the electrode surface to disable the Au-silacycle coupling. Additionally, we can switch between conductive pathways in a single molecular junction by modulating the tip-substrate electrode distance. This study provides a new molecular design to control electronics in silicon-based single molecule wires.
Reaction mixtures for silvlating arene substrates and methods of using such reaction mixtures to silyiate the arene substrates are provided. Exemplary reaction mixtures include the arene substrate, a liganded metal catalyst, a hydrogen acceptor and an organic solvent. The reaction conditions allow for diverse substituents on the arene substrate.