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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

A Technique to Functionalize and Self-assemble Macroscopic Nanoparticle-ligand Monolayer Films onto Template-free Substrates
Published on: May 9, 2014
The information content of electron flow through adsorbed molecular monolayers
Paul A J Sherratt1, Hagai Cohen, Tamar Seideman
1Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, Illinois 60208-3113, USA. p-sherratt@northwestern.edu
Abstract:
We point to the ability of noncontact measurements of electron transport via self-assembled monolayers to provide chemical, A-resolved information about the underlying molecule. A conceptual framework is presented to model a current flow of soft electrons through a molecular monolayer to a substrate and explore the information content of this and other emerging noncontact measurements. A numerical scheme is developed where advantage is taken of the split-operator formalism to propagate the incident electronic wave function over a suitable periodic potential energy surface representing the self-assembled monolayer. The (experimentally observable) potential difference introduced by the transmitted electrons is extracted from the time-averaged electron density using the Poisson equation of classical electrostatics.
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