2015/06/30 by Gaël Reecht, Hervé Bulou, Fabrice Scheurer +5 · 19 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Ab initio #Chemistry #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Conductance #Conductive polymer #Current (fluid) #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Materials science #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Molecular physics #Molecular wire #Molecule #Nanotechnology #Optoelectronics #Physics #Polymer #Polythiophene #Quantum tunnelling #Scanning tunneling microscope #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b01283
published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 6(15), 2987-2992 (American Chemical Society)
openalex publication_date 2015/07/10 · arxiv created 2015/08/05 · arxiv updated 2015/08/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
A scanning tunnelling microscope is used to pull a polythiophene wire from a Au(111) surface while measuring the current traversing the junction. Abrupt current increases measured during the lifting procedure are associated with the detachment of molecular subunits, in apparent contradiction with the expected exponential decrease of the conductance with wire length. Ab initio simulations reproduce the experimental data and demonstrate that this unexpected behavior is due to release of mechanical stress in the wire, paving the way to mechanically gated single-molecule electronic devices.