Resolving Ambiguity of the Kondo Temperature Determination in Mechanically Tunable Single-Molecule Kondo Systems

Determination of the molecular Kondo temperature (T_K) poses a challenge in most cases when the experimental temperature cannot be tuned to a sufficient extent. We show how this ambiguity can be resolved if additional control parameters are present, such as magnetic field and mechanical gating. We record the evolution of the differential conductance by lifting an individual molecule from the metal surface with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. By fitting the measured conductance spectra with the single impurity Anderson model we are able to demonstrate that the lifting tunes the junction continuously from the strongly correlated Kondo-singlet to the free spin-1/2 ground state. In the crossover regime, where T_K is similar to the temperature of experiment, the fitting yields ambiguous estimates of T_K varying by an order of magnitude. We show that analysis of the conductance measured in two distinct external magnetic fields can be used to resolve this problem.