Abstract

The past decade has seen tremendous progress in realizing molecular analogues of macroscale electronic components, such as resistors, diodes, switches or transistors, where the molecular circuit property is determined by the chemical structure and physical properties of the metal-molecule-metal junction. This progress has been enabled by the scanning tunneling microscope (STM)-based break-junction technique that my group has pioneered, which facilitates reliable and reproducible measurements of single-molecule devices. In this talk, I will first describe how we developed this technique to probe fundamental properties of circuit elements created with organic molecules and then give you an example of how we created long and highly conducting molecular wires using one-dimensional molecular analogs of topological insulators.