An electromechanical amplifier using a single molecule

Theory of an all-carbon molecular switch

“…34 The latter is determined by the superposition of the resonance tails and for molecules with highly degenerate HOMO and LUMO manifolds such as the isolated C 60 , an increase of this overlap can be achieved by lifting the degeneracy. 6,10 In our calculations, coupling to the leads changes the electronic structure of the fullerene in a similar fashion. However, our results suggest additional competing effects.…”

“…3 One of the most intensively studied molecules in the field is the fullerene C 60 , whose electronic transport properties were measured and manipulated by scanning tunneling microscopy ͑STM͒ techniques. 5 Several examples of fullerenebased devices have been investigated both experimentally [6][7][8][9] and theoretically. [10][11][12][13] Suggested mechanisms to control the conductance at a single C 60 molecular junction are either of electromechanical nature ͑utilizing an STM tip to compress the molecule 5,10 ͒ or based on charge transfer ͑controlled by a gate potential in a three-terminal geometry 12 ͒.…”

Electrical Conduction through Molecules

“…2. This has been observed using many different approaches including breakjunctions [7,8,9,10,11], scanning probes [12,13,14,15], nanopores [16] and a host of other methods (see for example [17]). A number of theoretical models have been developed for calculating the I-V characteristics of molecular wires using semiempirical [15,18,19,20,21] as well as first principles [22,23,24,25,26,27,28] theory.…”

Overview of nanoelectronic devices

“…The great power and variety of organic chemistry also should offer more options for designing and fabricating nanometer-scale devices than are available in silicon [14], [30], [31], [33], [35], [36]. Increasingly, this is driving investigators to design, model, fabricate, and test individual molecules [32], [75], [98], [105], [138], [154], [164], [166], [168], [195], [196] and nanometer-scale supramolecular structures [112], [126] that act as electrical switches and even exhibit some of the same properties as small solid-state transistors [98]. Molecular electronics does remain a more speculative research area than solid-state nanoelectronics, but it has achieved steady advances consistent with Aviram's strategy [34] for making molecular electronic circuits viable, inexpensive, and truly integrated on the nanometer scale.…”

“…• electric-field controlled molecular electronic switching devices, including molecular quantum-effect devices [36]; • electromechanical molecular electronic devices, employing electrically or mechanically applied forces to change the conformation [98] or to move a switching molecule or group of atoms [121], [170] to turn a current on and off; • photoactive/photochromic molecular switching devices [14], [36], [56], [64]- [66], which use light to change the shape, orientation, or electron configuration of a molecule in order to switch a current; • electrochemical molecular devices [67], [68], [121], which use electrochemical reactions to change the shape, orientation, or electron configuration of a molecule and hence to switch a current. Many examples and details about the various types of molecular electronic devices are provided in the references cited above and elsewhere [107], [108].…”