Charge injection into disordered molecular films

On-wire lithography-generated molecule-based transport junctions: a new testbed for molecular electronics

On-wire lithography (OWL) fabricated nanogaps are used as a new testbed to construct molecular transport junctions (MTJs) through the assembly of thiolated molecular wires across a nanogap formed between two Au electrodes. In addition, we show that one can use OWL to rapidly characterize a MTJ and optimize gap size for two molecular wires of different dimensions. Finally, we have used this new testbed to identify unusual temperature-dependent transport mechanisms for alpha,omega-dithiol terminated oligo(phenylene ethynylene).

Molecular electronics: some views on transport junctions and beyond

The field of molecular electronics comprises a fundamental set of issues concerning the electronic response of molecules as parts of a mesoscopic structure and a technology-facing area of science. We will overview some important aspects of these subfields. The most advanced ideas in the field involve the use of molecules as individual logic or memory units and are broadly based on using the quantum state space of the molecule. Current work in molecular electronics usually addresses molecular junction transport, where the molecule acts as a barrier for incoming electrons: This is the fundamental Landauer idea of "conduction as scattering" generalized to molecular junction structures. Another point of view in terms of superexchange as a guiding mechanism for coherent electron transfer through the molecular bridge is discussed. Molecules generally exhibit relatively strong vibronic coupling. The last section of this overview focuses on vibronic effects, including inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy, hysteresis in junction charge transport, and negative differential resistance in molecular transport junctions.

Master equation approach to charge injection and transport in organic insulators

We develop a master equation model of a disordered organic insulator sandwiched between metallic electrodes by treating as rate processes both the injection and the internal transport. We show how the master equation model allows for the inclusion of crucial correlation effects in the charge transport, particularly of the Pauli exclusion principle and of space-charge effects, besides, being dependent on just the microscopic form of the transfer rate between the localized electronic states, it allows for the investigation of different microscopic scenarios in the organic, such as polaronic hopping, correlated energy levels, interaction with image charge, etc. The model allows for a separate analysis of the injection and the recombination currents. We find that the disorder, besides increasing the injection current, eliminates the possibility of observation of a Fowler-Nordheim injection current at zero temperature, and that it does not alter the Schottky barrier size of the zero-field thermionic injection current from the value based on the energy difference between the electrode Fermi level and the highest occupied molecular orbital/lowest unoccupied molecular orbital levels in the organic, but it makes the Arrhenius temperature dependence appear at larger temperatures. We investigate how the I(V) characteristics of a device is affected by the presence of correlations in the site energy distribution and by the form of the internal hopping rate, specifically the Miller-Abrahams rate and the Marcus or small-polaron rate. We show that the disorder does not modify significantly the ebeta square root E field dependence of the net current due to the Schottky barrier lowering caused by the attraction between the charge and its image in the electrode.