Single-molecule junctions have been extensively used to probe properties as diverse as electrical conduction 1-3 , light emission 4 , thermoelectric energy conversion 5,6 , quantum interference 7,8 , heat dissipation 9,10 and electronic noise 11 at atomic and molecular scales. However, a key quantity of current interest-the thermal conductance of single-molecule junctions-has not yet been directly experimentally determined, owing to the challenge of detecting minute heat currents at the picowatt level. Here we show that picowatt-resolution scanning probes previously developed to study the thermal conductance of single-metal-atom junctions 12 , when used in conjunction with a time-averaging measurement scheme to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, also allow quantification of the much lower thermal conductance of single-molecule junctions. Our experiments on prototypical Au-alkanedithiol-Au junctions containing two to ten carbon atoms confirm that thermal conductance is to a first approximation independent of molecular length, consistent with detailed ab initio simulations. We anticipate that our approach will enable systematic exploration of thermal transport in many other one-dimensional systems, such as short molecules and polymer chains, for which computational predictions of thermal conductance 13-16 have remained experimentally inaccessible.Studies of charge and heat transport in molecules are of great fundamental interest, and are of critical importance for the development of a variety of technologies, including molecular electronics 17 , thermally conductive polymers 18 and thermoelectric energy-conversion devices 19 . Given this overall importance and the daunting experimental challenges, a number of initial studies explored charge transport in ensembles of molecules 20,21 . Although such measurements provided important insights, researchers gradually began to realize that it was
We report intrinsically self-healable and stretchable ionic thermoelectric materials, which exhibits excellent ionic figure-of-merit (1.04), with remarkable stretchability (~750%) and autonomous self-healability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.