Highly Efficient Long-Range Electron Transport in a Viologen-Based Molecular Junction

Quyen Van Nguyen, Pascal Martin, Denis Frath, Maria Luisa Della Rocca, Frederic Lafolet, Sebastien Bellinck, Philippe Lafarge, Jean Christophe Lacroix

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

56 Scopus citations

Abstract

Thin layers of viologen-based oligomers with thicknesses between 3 and 14 nm were deposited on gold electrodes by electrochemical reduction of a diazonium salt, and then a Ti/Au top contact was applied to complete a solid-state molecular junction (MJ). MJs show symmetric J-V curves and highly efficient long-range transport, with an attenuation factor as small as 0.25 nm-1. This is attributed both to the fact that the viologen LUMO energy lies between the energies of the Fermi levels of the two contacts and to strong electronic coupling between molecules and contacts. As a consequence, resonant tunneling is likely to be the dominant transport mechanism within these MJs, but the temperature dependence of the transport properties suggests that activated redox hopping plays a role at high temperature.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)10131-10134
Number of pages4
JournalJournal of the American Chemical Society
Volume140
Issue number32
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 15 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France) is gratefully acknowledged for its financial support of this work (ANR-15-CE09 0001-01). We thank Dr. John Lomas for editing our manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Chemical Society.

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