Observation of molecular orbital gating.pdfVIP

Vol 462 | 24/31 December 2009 | doi:10.1038/nature08639 LETTERS Observation of molecular orbital gating 1,2 3 2 3 4 1,2 Hyunwook Song , Youngsang Kim {, Yun Hee Jang , Heejun Jeong , Mark A. Reed Takhee Lee The control of charge transport in an active electronic device backbone as a s-saturated aliphatic molecule; and the active device, depends intimately on the modulation of the internal charge density a 1,4-benzenedithiol (BDT) with a delocalized aromatic ring as a by an external node1. For example, a field-effect transistor relies on p-conjugated molecule. We found 35 devices with sigmoidal and the gated electrostatic modulation of the channel charge produced significantly gate-dependent source–drain current (I)–voltage (V) by changing the relative position of the conduction and valence characteristics. The measured low-bias conductance is in good agree- bands with respect to the electrodes. In molecular-scale devices2–10, ment with single-molecule conductance values of the molecules of a longstanding challenge has been to create a true three-terminal interest (Supplementary Fig. 4). Coherent, off-resonance tunnelling device that operates in this manner (that is, by modifying orbital with a strong molecule–metal contact coupling (for example, the energy). Here we report the observation of such a solid-state thiol–gold bond) can be reasonably expected as a conduction mech- molecular device, in which tra