Recent technological advances allow for the fabrication of single molecule electronic circuits. In particular, the Scanning Tunneling Microscopy based Breaking Junction method (STM-BJ) developed in 2003 provides reliable, reproducible generation and measurement of electronic properties of molecular circuits. In order to complete the circuit with gold electrodes, special gold atom binding groups are installed at the both terminals of organic compound of interest. Typical gold binding groups include amino, thiol, methyl sulfide, thiochroman and pyridine. To expand this toolbox, we investigated the imidazole as a potential candidate for the first time. We have quickly synthesized a series of di(imidazolyl) alkanes (Im-n-Im, n = 3, 4, 5 & 6) by one-pot <i>S<sub>N</sub>2</i> reaction. Their conductance results by STM-BJ shows exponential decay as the molecules expands longer. These initial promising results confirms our original hypothesis – imidazole can be utilized as gold atom binding group in STM-BJ. Further explorations into the detail of bind-release mechanism as well as general application of imidazole in conjugated systems are under way.

Imidazole as a novel and robust gold binding group at STM-BJ method

256th National Meeting (2018)

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