Forty years of molecular electronics: Non‐equilibrium heat and charge transport at the nanoscale

Abstract

The “Quo Vadis?” meeting in Bremen (March 2013) was a spectacular opportunity for people involved in molecular electronics to catch up on the latest, to think back, and to project into the future. This manuscript is divided into two halves. In the first half, we address some of the history and where the field has advanced in the areas of measuring, modeling, making, and understanding materials. We review some big ideas that have animated the field of molecular electronics since its beginning, and are at the height of interest and accomplishment at the moment. Then, we discuss six major areas where the field is evolving, and in which we expect to see very exciting work in the years and decades ahead. As a representative of one of the neer themes, the second half of the paper is devoted to molecular thermoelectrics. It contains some formalism, some results, some experimental comparison, and some intriguing conceptual questions, both for pure science and for device applications. An artist's rendition of a self‐assembled monolayer of polyphenylether molecules on Au contacted by a Au STM.

Full counting statistics of vibrationally assisted electronic conduction: Transport and fluctuations of thermoelectric efficiency

“…[57][58][59][60][61] . Certain type of molecular junctions could be well represented by our model, when electron transport due to H I dominates over both elastic tunneling H tunn and the diagonal electron-phonon coupling H (1) I . This is the case e.g.…”

Trends in molecular design strategies for ambient stable n-channel organic field effect transistors

“…39 Realistic modeling of long-range transport through organic materials is extremely complicated, as it requires accurate calculation of intramolecular and intermolecular coupling and must take structural and dynamical disorder into account. 34, [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52] Theoretically predicted electron mobilities of idealized materials without disorder are therefore upper bounds for the highest possible mobility and should not be expected to reproduce experimental values. Intramolecular transport through a long, p-conjugated system is coherent band-like as confirmed by increasing conductivity with decreasing temperature.…”

Charge Tunneling along Short Oligoglycine Chains

“…(10,11) The mechanisms (e.g., tunneling, inelastic hopping, or other processes) of CT through peptides are still incompletely defined, and have been variously suggested to depend on the length of the peptide, the presence of secondary structure, and the presence of specific side chains. (1,12,13) Rates of charge tunneling across SAMs composed of n-alkanethiolates have been studied extensively (14)(15)(16)(17)(18), and most commonly characterized using the parameters of the simplified Simmons equation (eq. 1).…”