July 14, 2015

Researchers Build a Transistor from a Molecule and a Few Atoms




(July 14, 2015)  An international team of physicists has used a scanning tunneling microscope to create a minute transistor consisting of a single molecule and a small number of atoms. The observed transistor action is markedly different from the conventionally expected behavior and could be important for future device technologies as well as for fundamental studies of electron transport in molecular nanostructures. The physicists represent the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Germany, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL), Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Their complete findings are published in the 13 July 2015 issue of the journal Nature Physics.

Transistors have a channel region between two external contacts and an electrical gate electrode to modulate the current flow through the channel. In atomic-scale transistors, this current is extremely sensitive to single electrons hopping via discrete energy levels. In earlier studies, researchers have examined single-electron transport in molecular transistors using top-down approaches, such as lithography and break junctions. But atomically precise control of the gate—which is crucial to transistor action at the smallest size scales—is not possible with these approaches.

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