Single-Atom Control of Single-Molecule van der Waals Junctions with Semimetallic Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Electrodes

Lu, Zhixing and Hou, Songjun and Lin, Rongjian and Shi, Jie and Wu, Qingqing and Zhao, Shiqiang and Lin, Luchun and Tang, Chun and Yang, Yang and Lambert, Colin J. and Hong, Wenjing (2023) Single-Atom Control of Single-Molecule van der Waals Junctions with Semimetallic Transition Metal Dichalcogenide Electrodes. Nano Letters, 23 (13). pp. 6027-6034. ISSN 1530-6984

Text (TMDC_Main_NL_20230624 R2(1))
TMDC_Main_NL_20230624_R2_1_.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (934kB)

Abstract

Electrodes play an essential role in controlling electrode-molecule coupling. However, conventional metal electrodes require linkers to anchor the molecule. Van der Waals interaction offers a versatile strategy to connect the electrode and molecule without anchor groups. Except for graphene, the potential of other materials as electrodes to fabricate van der Waals molecular junctions remains unexplored. Herein, we utilize semimetallic transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) 1T'-WTe as electrodes to fabricate WTe /metalated tetraphenylporphyrin (M-TPP)/WTe junctions via van der Waals interaction. Compared with chemically bonded Au/M-TPP/Au junctions, the conductance of these M-TPP van der Waals molecular junctions is enhanced by ∼736%. More importantly, WTe /M-TPP/WTe junctions exhibit the tunable conductance from 10 to 10 (1.15 orders of magnitude) via single-atom control, recording the widest tunable range of conductance for M-TPP molecular junctions. Our work demonstrates the potential of two-dimensional TMDCs for constructing highly tunable and conductive molecular devices.