Single‐Molecule Sensing of Environmental pH—an STM Break Junction and NEGF‐DFT Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sensors play a significant role in the detection of toxic species and explosives, and in the remote control of chemical processes. In this work, we report a single-molecule-based pH switch/sensor that exploits the sensitivity of dye molecules to environmental pH to build metal-molecule-metal (m-M-m) devices using the scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) break junction technique. Dyes undergo pH-induced electronic modulation due to reversible structural transformation between a conjugated and a nonconjugated form, resulting in a change in the HOMO-LUMO gap. The dye-mediated m-M-m devices react to environmental pH with a high on/off ratio (≈100:1) of device conductivity. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations, carried out under the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) framework, model charge transport through these molecules in the two possible forms and confirm that the HOMO-LUMO gap of dyes is nearly twice as large in the nonconjugated form as in the conjugated form.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".