Investigation of Coulomb blockade diamonds of 7-helicenes interacting with gold nanoparticles

Abstract

Helicene molecules show promising properties for future applications in optoelectronics due to their impressive optical properties and long effective conjugation. In this work, we thus study the properties of [7]-Helicenes in junctions with gold nanoparticles with emphasis on charge transport. The two helicenes are positioned between gold nanoparticles of different sizes creating to emulate molecular junctions and we utilize a combined quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical methodology using the polarizable embedding scheme to compute Coulomb blockade diamonds for the helicenes. Both molecules create Coulomb blockade diamonds following the 1-3-2 pattern.