Electrical and optical studies of gap states in self-assembled molecular aggregates

We fabricated a variety of two-terminal devices using self-assembled monolayers (SAM) of solid-state mixtures comprised of molecular "wires" [1,4-methane-benzenedithiol (Me-BDT)] and molecular insulator "spacers" [1-pentanethiol], which were prepared at various molar concentrations ratio, r of wires/spacers, and sandwiched between two gold electrodes. The devices' electrical transport was investigated at several r values using the bias voltage (V) dependencies of the conductance and differential conductance at various temperatures. In parallel, we also studied the UV-visible absorption and photoluminescence (PL) emission spectra of the SAM mixtures grown on silica transparent substrates.