Research Topics 2011
Chemical Wiring and Soldering of Single Molecules -Toward All-Molecule Electronic Circuitry-
May 6, 2011
- This research was conducted by
- Yuji Okawa1, Swapan K. Mandal1, Chunping Hu1, Yoshitaka Tateyama1, 2, Stefan Goedecker3, Shigeru Tsukamoto1, 4, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa1, James K. Gimzewski1, 5 and Masakazu Aono1
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1MANA, NIMS, 2PRESTO and CREST, JST, 3University of Basel, 4Forschungszentrum Jülich, 5UCLA
A novel method, “chemical soldering”, for connecting single conductive polymer nanowires to single functional molecules has been successfully developed. This is a key step in advancing the development of all-molecule electronic circuit, in which each molecule performs the basic functions of electronics.
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.