2023/12/01 by T. de Ara, Chunwei Hsu, de Ara, T. +21 · 2 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Graphene research and applications #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Synthesis and Properties of Aromatic Compounds
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.00504
openalex publication_date 2023/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Helical molecules have been identified as potential candidates for investigating electronic transport, spin filtering, or even piezoelectricity. However, the description of the transport mechanism is not straightforward in single molecular junctions. In this work, we study the electronic transport in break junctions of a series of three helical molecules: dithia[n]helicenes, with n=7, 9, 11 molecular units, and detail the synthesis of two kinds of dithia[11]helicenes, varying the location of the sulfur atoms. Our experimental study demonstrates low conductance values that remain similar across different biases and molecules. Additionally, we assess the length dependence of the conductance for each helicene, revealing an exponential decay characteristic of off-resonant transport. This behaviour is primarily attributed to the misalignment between the energy levels of the molecule-electrodes system. The length dependence trend described above is supported by ab initio calculations, further confirming the off-resonant transport mechanism.