Conductance of Single Cobalt Chalcogenide Cluster Junctions

• Published in: Journal of the American Chemical Society Vol. 133; no. 22; pp. 8455 - 8457
• Main Authors: Boardman, Brycelyn M, Widawsky, Jonathan R, Park, Young S, Schenck, Christine L, Venkataraman, Latha, Steigerwald, Michael L, Nuckolls, Colin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 08.06.2011
• ISSN: 0002-7863; 1520-5126
• DOI: 10.1021/ja201334s

Understanding the electrical properties of semiconducting quantum dot devices have been limited due to the variability of their size/composition and the chemistry of ligand/electrode binding. Furthermore, to probe their electrical conduction properties and its dependence on ligand/electrode binding, measurements must be carried out at the single dot/cluster level. Herein we report scanning tunneling microscope based break junction measurements of cobalt chalcogenide clusters with Te, Se and S to probe the conductance properties. Our measured conductance trends show that the Co–Te based clusters have the highest conductance while the Co-S clusters the lowest. These trends are in very good agreement with cyclic voltammetry measurements of the first oxidation potentials and with density functional theory calculations of their HOMO–LUMO gaps.