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Single-Molecule Conductance Behavior of Molecular Bundles

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
  • Alejandro Bara-Estaún
  • Inco J. Planje
  • Renad Almughathawi
  • Saman Naghibi
  • Andrea Vezzoli
  • David C. Milan
  • Colin Lambert
  • Santiago Martin
  • Pilar Cea
  • Richard J. Nichols
  • Simon J. Higgins
  • Dmitry S. Yufit
  • Sara Sangtarash
  • Ross J. Davidson
  • Andrew Beeby
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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>25/12/2023
<mark>Journal</mark>Inorganic Chemistry
Issue number51
Volume62
Number of pages8
Pages (from-to)20940-20947
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date11/12/23
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Controlling the orientation of complex molecules in molecular junctions is crucial to their development into functional devices. To date, this has been achieved through the use of multipodal compounds (i.e., containing more than two anchoring groups), resulting in the formation of tri/tetrapodal compounds. While such compounds have greatly improved orientation control, this comes at the cost of lower surface coverage. In this study, we examine an alternative approach for generating multimodal compounds by binding multiple independent molecular wires together through metal coordination to form a molecular bundle. This was achieved by coordinating iron­(II) and cobalt­(II) to 5,5′-bis­(methylthio)-2,2′-bipyridine (L 1 ) and (methylenebis­(4,1-phenylene))­bis­(1-(5-(methylthio)­pyridin-2-yl)­methanimine) (L 2 ) to give two monometallic complexes, Fe-1 and Co-1, and two bimetallic helicates, Fe-2 and Co-2. Using XPS, all of the complexes were shown to bind to a gold surface in a fac fashion through three thiomethyl groups. Using single-molecule conductance and DFT calculations, each of the ligands was shown to conduct as an independent wire with no impact from the rest of the complex. These results suggest that this is a useful approach for controlling the geometry of junction formation without altering the conductance behavior of the individual molecular wires.