Tunneling conductance of amine linked alkyl chains

TL;DR

This paper applies a tunneling conductance theory to amine-linked alkyl chains in molecular devices, revealing an exponential decay of conductance with chain length consistent with experimental results.

Contribution

It extends previous tunneling conductance models to amine-linked alkyl chains, providing analytical expressions and length dependence insights for molecular electronics.

Findings

Conductance decays exponentially with chain length.

Analytical expressions match experimental data.

Transport characteristics vary with number of methyl groups.

Abstract

The tunneling transport theory developed in Phys. Rev. B {\bf 76}, 115102 (2007) is applied to molecular devices made of alkyl chains linked to gold electrodes via amine groups. Using the analytic expression of the tunneling conductance derived in our previous work, we identify the key physical quantities that characterize the conductance of these devices. By investigating the transport characteristics of three devices, containing 4, 6, and 8 methyl groups, we extract the dependence of the tunneling conductance on the chain's length, which is an exponential decay law in close agreement with recent experimental data.