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Published on: July 19, 2022
Investigating Molecular Junctions Based on Mixed Self-Assembled Monolayers to Understand the Impact of Intermolecular
Jiajun Feng1,2, Ioan Bâldea3, Jiajie Gao1
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Materials and Technologies for Energy Conversion, Guangdong Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, 241 Daxue Road, Shantou, Guangdong 515063, China.
Abstract:
To interrogate the importance of intermolecular interactions on charge transport at the nanoscale, we investigate molecular tunnel junctions based on mixed self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of 1-alkyl (CnT) thiols and their fluorinated counterparts (F-CnT) that have substantially different tunneling conductances. Experiments on mixed CnT1-:F-CnT SAMs between Au contacts reveal a strongly nonlinear (exponential) dependence of the tunneling conductance G on composition x, a behavior that is tempting to assign to the strong impact of intra-SAM intermolecular interactions. However, analysis suggests that the exponential dependence of G on x does not arise from intra-SAM intermolecular interactions, but instead emerges from the work function modification of the Au electrode which varies linearly with x.
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