Direct Optical Determination of Interfacial Transport
Barriers in Molecular Tunnel Junctions
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Abstract
Molecular
electronics seeks to build circuitry using organic components
with at least one dimension in the nanoscale domain. Progress in the
field has been inhibited by the difficulty in determining the energy
levels of molecules after being perturbed by interactions with the
conducting contacts. We measured the photocurrent spectra for large-area
aliphatic and aromatic molecular tunnel junctions with partially transparent
copper top contacts. Where no molecular absorption takes place, the
photocurrent is dominated by internal photoemission, which exhibits
energy thresholds corresponding to interfacial transport barriers,
enabling their direct measurement in a functioning junction