Carbon-fiber tips for scanning probe microscopes and molecular electronics experiments

Title

Carbon-fiber tips for scanning probe microscopes and molecular electronics experiments

 Author

Rubio-Bollinger, G.
Castellanos-Gomez, A.
Bilan, S.
Zotti, L.A.
Arroyo, C.R.
Agraït, N.
Cuevas, J.

Faculty

Applied Sciences

 Department

Kavli Insitute of Nanoscience

 Date

2012-05-15

 Abstract

We fabricate and characterize carbon-fiber tips for their use in combined scanning tunneling and force microscopy based on piezoelectric quartz tuning fork force sensors. An electrochemical fabrication procedure to etch the tips is used to yield reproducible sub-100-nm apex. We also study electron transport through singlemolecule junctions formed by a single octanethiol molecule bonded by the thiol anchoring group to a gold electrode and linked to a carbon tip by the methyl group. We observe the presence of conductance plateaus during the stretching of the molecular bridge, which is the signature of the formation of a molecular junction.

 Subject

single-molecule junction
carbon electrodes
carbon electronics
STM break junction
carbon tip
quartz tuning fork

 To reference this document use:

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9891bb8f-73ac-457e-a153-a8bef4182749

 DOI

https://doi.org/10.1186/1556-276X-7-254

 Publisher

SpringerOpen

 ISSN

1556-276X

 Source

http://www.nanoscalereslett.com/

 Source

Nanoscale Research Letters, 7 (2012)

 Part of collection

Institutional Repository

 Document type

journal article

 Rights

© 2012 Rubio-Bollinger et al.; licensee Springer. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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