28 October 2007 in Nature Nanotechnology
21 October 2006 in Journal of the American Chemical Society
15 January 2012 in Nature Chemistry
27 February 2009 in Science
The development of electronic devices at the single-molecule scale requires detailed understanding of charge transport through individual molecular wires. To characterize the electrical conductance, it is necessary to vary the length of a single molecular wire, contacted to two electrodes, in a controlled way. Such studies usually determine the conductance of a certain molecular species with one specific length. We measure the conductance and mechanical characteristics of a single polyfluorene wire by pulling it up from a Au(111) surface with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope, thus continuously changing its length up to more than 20 nanometers. The conductance curves show not only an exponential decay but also characteristic oscillations as one molecular unit after another is detached from the surface during stretching.
29 January 2020 in Nature Chemistry
14 October 2012 in Nature Nanotechnology