Synthesis Of Silane Oligomers And Their Conductivity Studies

Single-molecule electronics is an emerging subfield of nanoelectronics where the ultimate goal is to use individual molecules as the active components in electronic circuitry.Over the past century,chemists have developed a rich understanding of how a molecule's structure determines its electronic properties;transposing the paradigms of chemistry into the design and understanding of single-molecule electronic devices can thus provide a tremendous impetus for growth in the field.This dissertation describes how we can harness the principles of organosilicon chemistry to control charge transport and function in single-molecule devices.Bulk silicon,the bedrock of information technology,consists of the deceptively simple electronic structure of just Si-Si ? bonds.Diamond has the same lattice structure as silicon,yet the two materials have dramatically different electronic properties.Molecular forms are the essential components of the bulk semiconductor.Moreover,as silicon electronics continues to scale to smaller length scales the connection between molecular silicon and silicon from bulk single crystals will become more explicit.In silicon electronics,conductive path and strain of the molecular has been found to an important parameter to insert and control to maximize performance.We use a scanning tunneling microscope-based break-junction(STM-BJ)technique to probe structure-conductivity relationships in silicon-based wires.Our studies ultimately demonstrate that charge transport in these systems is dictated by the conformation,conjugation,and bond polarity of the ?-backbone.Chapter 1 introduces the fields of single-molecule electronics,silicon microelectronics and our motivation for bridging these three worlds.The detailed processes of synthesizing organosilicon molecules are described in detail in Chapter 2and 3.Chapter 4 analyzes the conductivity test results of synthetic materials.