Press Release 2011
Chemical Wiring and Soldering of Single Molecules
-Toward All-Molecule Electronic Circuitry-

Figure 1 : Schematic image showing chemical soldering. A relevant functional molecule is placed on a molecular layer of diacetylene compound. A probe tip of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is used to initiate chain polymerization, which form a conductive polymer nanowire. Since the front edge of chain polymerization necessarily has a reactive chemical species, the created polymer nanowire spontaneously forms chemical bonding with an encountered molecular element.

Figure 2 : Series of STM images demonstrating the chemical soldering to a single functional phthalocyanine molecule. The left image shows phthalocyanine molecules adsorbed on a molecular layer. Chain polymerizations were then initiated to connect one (center image) and two (right image) conductive polymers to a single phthalocyanine molecule. The created polymers are observed as bright lines in the images.
Further information
Affiliations
- 1.International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (WPI-MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS)
- 2.PRESTO and CREST, JST
- 3.Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Basel
- 4.Peter Grünberg Institut, Forschungszentrum Jülich and JARA
- 5.California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA