Statistical Analysis of Electronic Transport in Alkanethiol Molecular Devices with Nanowell Structures.

We study charge transport through nanoscale molecular monolayers. For example, alkanethiol [CH$_{3}$(CH$_{2})_{n-1}$SH] self-assembled monolayer (SAM) is one of the most standard molecular systems that has been extensively investigated, and is very useful as a control in molecular devices because their structure and configuration have been sufficiently well-characterized. Reported here is a statistical analysis of electronic transport in alkanethiol SAM using different length alkanethiols. Particularly, we fabricated more than 6,000 molecular devices with nanowell structure, a vertical type of metal-molecule-metal junctions with nanometer scale junction diameter. We investigated transport properties such as temperature-variable current-voltage I(V,T) characteristics from these mass-fabricated devices. Based on the extensive I(V,T) data, a statistical analysis of transport characteristics in alkanethiol SAM will be presented.