Silicon Ring Strain Creates High-Conductance Pathways in Single-Molecule Circuits
作者:Timothy A. Su、Jonathan R. Widawsky、Haixing Li、Rebekka S. Klausen、James L. Leighton、Michael L. Steigerwald、Latha Venkataraman、Colin Nuckolls
DOI:10.1021/ja410656a
日期:2013.12.11
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.