Over the past few decades, the field of molecular electronics has greatly benefited from advances in the fundamental understanding of charge transport mechanisms. Molecular junctions represent a field whose potential is realized through detailed studies of charge transport on the nanoscale. Applications of molecular junctions, such as molecular logic circuits, rely on precise mechanistic information as investigative techniques are refined. Current advances have originated from improvements in a variety of characterization techniques, with noise spectroscopy contributing to key studies of transport phenomena. Noise spectroscopy has shown to be useful for probing latent electronic characteristics in molecular junctions, giving insight beyond standard methods of charge transport study. This review presents an in-depth background on fundamental concepts in electronic noise spectroscopy, covering topics such as flicker, generation-recombination, random telegraph signal, and shot noises. Recent advances in noise spectroscopy techniques and their applications to the study of molecular junctions are discussed, highlighting the impact of this technique in the improvement of molecular junction stability and reliability, the study of interference in charge transport, and the emergence of vibrational excitation phenomena. This review provides a comprehensive understanding of noise analyses in the field of molecular junctions and gives insight for further advances in molecular and nanoscale electronics.
Electromigration—a critical failure mode of metal interconnects in integrated circuits—has been exploited for constructing nanometer-sized gaps (or nanogaps, less than a few nanometers) on metallic nanowires. Electromigrated nanogaps have been utilized extensively in the field of nanotechnology and have demonstrated to be an effective platform for electrically accessing small things such as molecules in a device fashion, establishing metal-molecule-metal junctions. These devices allow the study of the electronic transport phenomena through molecules and DNA. Furthermore, electromigrated nanogaps can read out incident electromagnetic fields as an antenna due to the plasmonic excitation on the surface, which is usually maximized in nanogaps. Moreover, structural changes caused by electromigration on metallic nanowires have been leveraged to create single-component resistive switching memories. In this review, we discuss the recent progress and challenges of electromigration methods for a nanogap creation as well as their applications for electronic devices (molecular/DNA devices and resistive switches), thermoelectric energy conversion devices, and photonic devices (nanoantennas).
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