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Chemical Wiring and Soldering of Single Molecules

-Toward All-Molecule Electronic Circuitry-

2011.05.06

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.
fig. 1

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.

fig. 2

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.

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Affiliations

Yuji Okawa1, Swapan K. Mandal1, Chunping Hu1, Yoshitaka Tateyama1, 2, Stefan Goedecker3, Shigeru Tsukamoto1, 4, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa1, James K. Gimzewski1, 5, Masakazu Aono1
  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