Bending of conjugated molecular wires and its effect on electron conduction properties

The electronic structure and electron transport properties of simple conjugated molecular wires like oligophenylene ethynylene (OPE) and oligophenylene vinylene (OPV) are studied under compression. If artificially confined to a given shorter length, the oligomers tend to bend and bending causes a loss in the overlap of the conjugated molecular orbitals. Theoretical modeling of electronic transport has been carried out for all undistorted and compressed OPE/OPV oligomers. OPV exists in step-like or V-like conformations and they have the same stability with very similar frontier molecular orbitals. The conductances of these molecular wires are calculated when inserted between two gold probes and the conductances for OPV are found to be comparable to OPE when the interfaces are same. The conductance decreases with bending due to the gradual loss in overlap of the molecular orbitals. It is also found that the conductances of the molecular wires decrease very strongly if the terminal sulfur atom is simultaneously bonded to hydrogen and a gold surface, thus reflecting the importance of the interface in determining the conductance in two-probe systems. From the conductance studies it may be concluded that if one or more benzene rings of OPE are rotated from coplanar conditions, the orthogonal molecular orbitals may completely block the electronic transport, rendering the molecule insulating.