Transport in mesoscopic conductors

Electronic transport in mesoscopic structures

The size of electrical components has been scaled down by several orders of magnitude during the past decades arriving at structure sizes of only tens of nanometers in modern circuits. Electrical current on the nanocale obeys different laws than in macroscopic conductors. The resistance of macroscopic conductors is described by Ohm’s law, assuming diffusive charge transport carried by the conduction electrons. At small length scales this concept cannot be applied any more, electrons move ballistically at these length scales and transport needs to be described using a scattering approach. We will review the concepts used to describe mesoscopic conductors and give examples for typical structures that can be treated using these concepts.

Molecular electronics

The use of single molecules as active elements in electrical circuits may serve as alternative technology for building integrated circuits on the nanoscale. In this presentation we want to give an overview on various techniques that have been used successfully to contact single molecules and to characterize them electrically. Especially the comparison between different techniques shows that a single measurement is always prone to artifacts originating from the unknown microscopic details of the junctions. It is therefore necessary to perform a statistically relevant number of measurements in order to resolve molecular properties. Using these techniques various properties of the molecules can be studied. Special examples are the influence of conformational changes of the molecules, differences between various coupling endgroups of the molecules, effects of light-irradiation onto the molecular junctions, and the influence of self-organization in DNA nanostructures.