Electric fields as actuators in unimolecular contacts

Playing catch and release with single molecules: mechanistic insights into plasmon-controlled nanogaps

“…2 Reliable SM tools based on nanogaps have been developed during the last two decades 5 for high-precision SM trapping and detection to characterise individual molecules, enabling molecular recognition 6 and sensing. 7 Among them, electrically based detection tools 8 are most appealing ones. Electrical current readouts render these approaches label-free, since they rely on molecular electrical capture and release between the individual molecule and the nanogap.…”

“…[9][10][11][12][13][14] One of the most versatile electrical approaches to trap and study individual molecules is the one based on fixed and motionless interelectrode nanogaps of precise sub-nanometric dimensions. 10,11,[13][14][15] Electrical SM detection approaches are facing different inherent problems, 8 because working at room temperature (RT) and under ambient conditions make the localisation of the individual molecules in the reduced geometric space an entropically unfavoured process. On the one hand, the SM release to the nanogap is a thermally activated stochastic processes 16 with significantly reduced lifetimes at RT conditions, commonly ranging between tens and hundreds of milliseconds and thus resulting in very limited time resolution in current readouts.…”