A new paper that develops tools for quantitatively interpreting conductance histograms from break junction experiments has been accepted for publication in
ACS Nano. The authors of
Quantitative Interpretations of Break Junction Conductance Histograms in Molecular Electron Transport are Robert Quan, Christopher S. Pitler, Mark A. Ratner, and IACS Assistant Professor
Matthew G. Reuter.
All tools developed are implemented in version 1.3 of MolStat, one of the group's open-source software packages. Previous work in the group showed that a conductance histogram line shape (when only a molecule is present) yielded quantitative information on the level alignment and coupling strength between the molecule and the electrodes.
Present work also includes the effects of direct, electrode-electrode tunneling, which is depicted as the red shadings in the picture. This background tunneling is always experimentally present and is shown to significantly impact the ability to quantitatively estimate molecular properties from the histograms. For instance, neglecting background tunneling may lead to relative errors of 40%. Ultimately, this work allows the group to obtain additional and higher-quality information from experimental data.
