Abstract
The field of molecular electronics is prompted by tremendous opportunities for using a single-molecule and molecular monolayers as active components in integrated circuits. Until now, a wide range of molecular devices exhibiting characteristic functions, such as diodes, transistors, switches, and memory, have been demonstrated. However, a full understanding of the crucial factors that affect charge transport through molecular electronic junctions should yet be accomplished. Remarkably, recent advances in transition voltage spectroscopy (TVS) elucidate that it can provide key quantities for probing the transport characteristics of the junctions, including, for example, the position of the frontier molecular orbital energy relative to the electrode Fermi level and the strength of the molecule–electrode interactions. These parameters are known to be highly associated with charge transport behaviors in molecular systems and can then be used in the design of molecule-based devices with rationally tuned electronic properties. This article highlights the fundamental principle of TVS and then demonstrates its major applications to study the charge transport properties of molecular electronic junctions.
Highlights
New development of nanoscale devices utilizing individual molecules with active functional elements is a promising approach towards the ultimate miniaturized electronics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].It is highly significant to understand and manipulate the transport characteristics of carrying charges across molecular junctions, key for the construction of a single-molecule device [8,9,10,11,12,13]
Recent works by diverse research groups have consistently shown that transition voltage spectroscopy (TVS) [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42], especially on the basis for the Landauer picture, can be a more accurate analytical tool, in which quantitative fits into experimental current (I)–voltage (V) curves allow conveniently extracting charge transport parameters, for instance, the alignment of the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) or lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO), the tunneling transmission, and the coupling strength of molecule–electrode contacts
The results described that the conductance and tunneling photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS) for oligophenylene monothiols (OPT) and OPD selfself-assembled monolayer (SAM) on Pt, Au, and Ag agreed very decaymuch coefficient of oligophenylene-based molecular wereinvolved largely related with εh trans estimated from TVS
Summary
New development of nanoscale devices utilizing individual molecules with active functional elements is a promising approach towards the ultimate miniaturized electronics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. If εh or εl is much greater than the broadening of molecular orbital levels thanks to the couplings with metallic electrodes, TVS can be reinterpreted by using a coherent transport model with one molecular level [34,43,44,45,46,47,48], providing an excellent quantitative description of the transport experiments for molecular junctions In this Review, we demonstrate fundamental principles of TVS (Section 2), focusing on key working equations and discuss its recent application to investigating charge carrier transport through molecular electronic junctions (Section 3)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
