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Frontier Orbital Gating of Rectification and Conductance in Tunneling Junctions Comprising Pyridine-Terminated Molecular Wires

2025· article· en· W4414883285 on OpenAlex
Saurabh Soni, Louise O. H. Hyllested, Marco Carlotti, Sumit Kumar, Jane Kardula, María Camarasa‐Gómez, Gemma C. Solomon, Ryan C. Chiechi

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueACS Nanoscience Au · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicMolecular Junctions and Nanostructures
Canadian institutionsInnovation Cluster (Canada)
FundersFP7 Ideas: European Research CouncilZernike Institute for Advanced Materials, Rijksuniversiteit GroningenAzrieli FoundationH2020 European Research CouncilRijksuniversiteit GroningenEuropean Commission
KeywordsMolecular orbitalConductanceMolecular dynamicsDensity functional theoryRectificationMolecular wireQuantum tunnellingMolecular electronics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This work experimentally investigates a mechanism of rectification in molecular junctions proposed by van Dyck and Ratner, supported by theoretical modeling. The defining feature of the mechanism is the spatial separation of frontier molecular orbitals such that each tracks the two leads independently. We achieve this orbital separation in oligophenyleneethylene molecular wires with electron-rich thiols and electron-poor pyridines at their termini. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations show localization of the frontier molecular orbitals at these termini that increases with the molecular length. Measurements of rectification ratios in molecular ensemble junctions using eutectic Ga-In (EGaIn) top-contacts and Au bottom-contacts reveal a length dependence that is almost completely insensitive to the insertion of a nonconjugated methylene spacer between the thiol anchor and conjugated backbone. Simulations using nonequilibrium Green's function + DFT methods show that transport is dominated by the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals, which track the EGaIn electrode, leading to rectification. These results validate the approach of creating molecular rectifiers by spatially separating the frontier molecular orbitals and show an approach to modeling their behavior under bias in ensemble junctions.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.061
Threshold uncertainty score0.404

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it