Rational manipulation and measurement of the conductance across single molecule junctions not only provides an ideal window for exploring conductance phenomena at the single molecular level, but also meets the requirement for junction functionality control. Creating different linker groups to the molecule by chemical synthesis is a commonly used method to tune the junction formation and molecular conductance. Here, by utilizing electrochemical gating in the scanning tunneling microscope based break-junction (STM-BJ) technique, we realized a new mechanism to create single molecule junctions. Specifically, we use electrochemical control to selectively create/destroy molecular junctions that could not be formed otherwise using thiol-terminated molecules. We enable the gate voltage-controlled selective molecule-electrode bond formation that allows us to investigate the electronic properties of disulfide bonds, which can only be stabilized under electrolytic environments. These results provide a novel strategy to create tunable molecular junctions and explore structure−function relationships for systems that are otherwise not accessible.

Manipulating single molecular junctions using electrochemical environments

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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