Electronic Transport through Self-Assembled Monolayers

The field of nanotechnology has made tremendous progress in the past decades, ranging from the experimental manipulations of single atoms and single molecules to the synthesis and possible applications of carbon nanotubes and semiconductor nanowires.^1–3 This remarkable research trend is driven partly by the human being's curiosities of exploring the ultimate small matter and partly by the microelectronics industry's need to go beyond the traditional photolithography-based top-down fabrication limitations. As the enormous literature has shown, nanometer scale device structures provide suitable testbeds for the investigations of novel physics in a new regime, especially at the quantum level, such as single electron tunneling or quantum confinement effect.⁴,⁵ On the other hand, as the semiconductor device feature size keeps decreasing, the traditional top-down microfabrications will soon enter the nanometer range and further continuous downscaling will become scientifically and economically challenging.⁶ This motivates researchers around the world to find alternate ways to meet the future increasing computing demands.