As electronic devices continue to get smaller and smaller, physical size limitations are beginning to disrupt the trend of doubling transistor density on silicon-based microchips approximately every two years, according to Moore's law. Molecular electronics—the use of single molecules as the building blocks for electronic components—offers a potential pathway for the continued miniaturization of small-scale electronic devices. Devices that utilize molecular electronics require precise control over the flow of electrical current.
However, the dynamic nature of these single molecule components affects device performance and impacts reproducibility.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report a unique strategy for controlling molecular conductance by using molecules with rigid backbones—such as ladder-type molecules, known as being shape-persistent. Further, they have demonstrated a straightforward "one-pot" method for synthesizing such molecules. The principles were then applied to the synthesis of a butterfly-like molecule, showing the strategy's generality for controlling molecular conductance.
This new research, led by Charles Schroeder, the James Economy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, along with postdoc Xiaolin Liu and graduate student Hao Yang, appears in the journal Nature Chemistry.
"In the field of molecular electronics, you have to consider the flexibility and the motion of the molecules and how that affects the functional properties," Schroeder says. "And it turns out that plays a significant role in the electronic properties of molecules. To overcome this challenge and achieve a constant conductivity regardless of the conformation, our solution was to prepare molecules with rigid backbones."
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