High electronic couplings of single mesitylene molecular junctions

Abstract

We report on an experimental analysis of the charge transport properties of single mesitylene (1,3,5-trimethylbenzene) molecular junctions. The electronic conductance and the current-voltage characteristics of mesitylene molecules wired into Au electrodes were measured by a scanning tunnelling microscopy-based break-junction method at room temperature in a liquid environment. We found the molecular junctions exhibited two distinct conductance states with high conductance values of ca. 10-1G0 and of more than 10-3G0 (G0 = 2e2/h) in the electronic conductance measurements. We further performed a statistical analysis of the current-voltage characteristics of the molecular junctions in the two states. Within a single channel resonant tunnelling model, we obtained electronic couplings in the molecular junctions by fitting the current-voltage characteristics to the single channel model. The origin of the high conductance was attributed to experimentally obtained large electronic couplings of the direct p-bonded molecular junctions (ca. 0.15 eV). Based on analysis of the stretch length of the molecular junctions and the large electronic couplings obtained from the I-V analysis, we proposed two structural models, in which (i) mesitylene binds to the Au electrode perpendicular to the charge transport direction and (ii) mesitylene has tilted from the perpendicular orientation.