Though generally considered insulating, recent progress on the discovery of conductive porous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) offers new opportunities for their integration as electroactive components in electronic devices. Compared to classical semiconductors, these metal-organic hybrids combine the crystallinity of inorganic materials with easier chemical functionalization and processability. Still, future development depends on the ability to produce high-quality films with fine control over their orientation, crystallinity, homogeneity, and thickness. Here self-assembled monolayer substrate modification and bottom-up techniques are used to produce preferentially oriented, ultrathin, conductive films of Cu-CAT-1. The approach permits to fabricate and study the electrical response of MOF-based devices incorporating the thinnest MOF film reported thus far (10 nm thick).

Conductive metal–organic frameworks are opening new perspectives for the use of these porous materials for applications traditionally limited to more classical inorganic materials, such as their integration into electronic devices. This has enabled the development of chemiresistive sensors capable of transducing the presence of specific guests into an electrical response with good selectivity and sensitivity. By combining experimental data with computational modelling, a possible origin for the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon in ultrathin films (ca. 30 nm) of Cu‐CAT‐1 is described.

Chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS), the effect of helical molecules acting as room temperature hard magnets that confer spin polarization to electrical current, is an intriguing effect with potential applications in nanospintronics. In this scenario, molecules that are paramagnetic as well as helical would introduce a new degree of freedom in the same nano-scale device that has not been explored so far. Here, in order to investigate this idea, we propose the preparation of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) based on a helical lanthanide binding tag peptide (LnLBTC) on a ferromagnetic substrate. We confirmed room temperature spin filtering of LnLBTC SAMs by well-established electrochemical approach and by direct local spin transport measurements in solid state devices. The latter were studied by a common liquid-metal drop electron transport system, easily implemented for spin dependent measurements. Electrochemistry shows an averaged spin polarization (SP) of ~5% in presence of a saturation magnetic field (H = 350 mT) while local measurements performed in solid state showed a SP of ~50 20% thanks to the reduction of the contribution of pure electron transport in non-covered areas. Calculations showed that conduction electrons interact strongly with the coordinated lanthanide ion, meaning a fixed chirality-based spin filtering can coexist with a spin filtering that is dependent on the polarization of the magnetic metal ion. This opens the door to all-organic single-molecule memristive devices.

No abstract