Electronic Transport Measurements on Si4 Clusters

A still intriguing issue in the field of molecular electronics is the dependence of the transport properties of a molecule or cluster on the exact geometric realization of the contact at the atomic scale. Here, Si4 clusters come in handy as they have a very well known rhombohedral geometry [1] as well as a limited yet diverse number of possibilities of being contacted: A contact may be formed along the long or the short axis, along the median of an edge, or along the surface normal of the rhombohedron.

After soft-landing from the gas phase, using a mechanically controllable breakjunction technique, possibly single or few Si4 clusters were contacted with atomically sharp tips and transport characteristics were measured. In addition to conductance histograms, current-voltage (IV) curves with and without clusters in the junction have been recorded. By comparison with the outcome of DFT calculations, the presence of the clusters in three of the four aforementioned contact geometries could be identified in the histograms.

By fitting a resonant tunneling model to the IV curves, the coupling between the clusters and the leads as well as the energy difference of the molecular orbital contributing to the transport and the Fermi energy in the leads could be determined. The highly non-linear IV curves obtained in the scope of these measurements contradict the theoretical predictions previously performed by C. Roland et al. who suggested a linear IV characteristic in the range of experimentally accessible bias voltages [2].

We thank F. Pauly for providing the DFT code and for introducing us to it’s use, A. Erbe and J. C. Cuevas for the introduction to the resonant tunneling model and valuable discussions.

[1] e.g., E. C. Honea et al., nature 366 (6450), 42 (1993)
[2] C. Roland et al., Phys. Rev. B 66 (3), 035332 (2002)