In Situ Tuning the Conductance of Single Molecular Diarylethene Switches

A major goal of molecular electronics is the development and implementation of molecular electronic devices such as single molecular switches. In this work we present a detailed study of single diarylethene molecules that were in situ switched from their non-conductive to conductive state in the presence of gold nanoelectrodes via controlled light irradiation. The molecules were dissolved in two different solvents and measured with two different side-groups. Histograms of conductance traces were taken and complemented by extracting the relative position of the current carrying molecular level and its level broadening from current-voltage characteristics by means of the single level transport model. The obtained results show a clear light-induced ring forming isomerization, which is almost independent of the side-groups, while electron withdrawing side groups lead to a reduction of conductance, a decrease of the level broadening and an increased difference between the molecular level and the Fermi energy of the metals. Quantum chemical calculations of the light-induced switching processes correlate these observations with the fundamentally different low-lying electronic states of the opened and closed forms and their comparably small modification by the electron-withdrawing substituents.