Force–conductance correlation in individual molecular junctions

Abstract

Conducting atomic force microscopy is an attractive approach enabling the correlation of mechanical and electrical properties in individual molecular junctions. Here we report on measurements of gold-gold and gold-octanedithiol-gold junctions. We introduce two-dimensional histograms in the form of scatter plots to better analyze the correlation between force and conductance. In this representation, the junction-forming octanedithiol compounds lead to a very clear step in the force-conductance data, which is not observed for control monothiol compounds. The conductance found for octanedithiols is in agreement with the idea that junction conductance is dominated by a single molecule.