Tag Archives: molecular rectifier

The world’s smallest diode is made from a single molecule

Both the University of Georgia (US) and the American Associates Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) have issued press releases about a joint research project resulting in the world’s smallest diode.

I stumbled across the April 4, 2016 University of Georgia news release on EurekAlert first,

Researchers at the University of Georgia and at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have demonstrated for the first time that nanoscale electronic components can be made from single DNA molecules. Their study, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, represents a promising advance in the search for a replacement for the silicon chip.

The finding may eventually lead to smaller, more powerful and more advanced electronic devices, according to the study’s lead author, Bingqian Xu.

“For 50 years, we have been able to place more and more computing power onto smaller and smaller chips, but we are now pushing the physical limits of silicon,” said Xu, an associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering and an adjunct professor in chemistry and physics. “If silicon-based chips become much smaller, their performance will become unstable and unpredictable.”

To find a solution to this challenge, Xu turned to DNA. He says DNA’s predictability, diversity and programmability make it a leading candidate for the design of functional electronic devices using single molecules.

In the Nature Chemistry paper, Xu and collaborators at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev describe using a single molecule of DNA to create the world’s smallest diode. A diode is a component vital to electronic devices that allows current to flow in one direction but prevents its flow in the other direction.

Xu and a team of graduate research assistants at UGA isolated a specifically designed single duplex DNA of 11 base pairs and connected it to an electronic circuit only a few nanometers in size. After the measured current showed no special behavior, the team site-specifically intercalated a small molecule named coralyne into the DNA. They found the current flowing through the DNA was 15 times stronger for negative voltages than for positive voltages, a necessary feature of a diode.

“This finding is quite counterintuitive because the molecular structure is still seemingly symmetrical after coralyne intercalation,” Xu said.

A theoretical model developed by Yanantan Dubi of Ben-Gurion University indicated the diode-like behavior of DNA originates from the bias voltage-induced breaking of spatial symmetry inside the DNA molecule after the coralyne is inserted.

“Our discovery can lead to progress in the design and construction of nanoscale electronic elements that are at least 1,000 times smaller than current components,” Xu said.

The research team plans to continue its work, with the goal of constructing additional molecular devices and enhancing the performance of the molecular diode.

The April 4, 2016 American Associates Ben-Gurion University of the Negev press release on EurekAlert covers much of the same ground while providing some new details,

The world’s smallest diode, the size of a single molecule, has been developed collaboratively by U.S. and Israeli researchers from the University of Georgia and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

“Creating and characterizing the world’s smallest diode is a significant milestone in the development of molecular electronic devices,” explains Dr. Yoni Dubi, a researcher in the BGU Department of Chemistry and Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. “It gives us new insights into the electronic transport mechanism.”

Continuous demand for more computing power is pushing the limitations of present day methods. This need is driving researchers to look for molecules with interesting properties and find ways to establish reliable contacts between molecular components and bulk materials in an electrode, in order to mimic conventional electronic elements at the molecular scale.

An example for such an element is the nanoscale diode (or molecular rectifier), which operates like a valve to facilitate electronic current flow in one direction. A collection of these nanoscale diodes, or molecules, has properties that resemble traditional electronic components such as a wire, transistor or rectifier. The emerging field of single molecule electronics may provide a way to overcome Moore’s Law– the observation that over the history of computing hardware the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years – beyond the limits of conventional silicon integrated circuits.

Prof. Bingqian Xu’s group at the College of Engineering at the University of Georgia took a single DNA molecule constructed from 11 base pairs and connected it to an electronic circuit only a few nanometers in size. When they measured the current through the molecule, it did not show any special behavior. However, when layers of a molecule called “coralyne,” were inserted (or intercalated) between layers of DNA, the behavior of the circuit changed drastically. The current jumped to 15 times larger negative vs. positive voltages–a necessary feature for a nano diode. “In summary, we have constructed a molecular rectifier by intercalating specific, small molecules into designed DNA strands,” explains Prof. Xu.

Dr. Dubi and his student, Elinor Zerah-Harush, constructed a theoretical model of the DNA molecule inside the electric circuit to better understand the results of the experiment. “The model allowed us to identify the source of the diode-like feature, which originates from breaking spatial symmetry inside the DNA molecule after coralyne is inserted.”

There’s an April 4, 2016 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) which provides a brief overview and a link to a previous essay, Whatever Happened to the Molecular Computer?

Here’s a link and citation for the paper,

Molecular rectifier composed of DNA with high rectification ratio enabled by intercalation by Cunlan Guo, Kun Wang, Elinor Zerah-Harush, Joseph Hamill, Bin Wang, Yonatan Dubi, & Bingqian Xu. Nature Chemistry (2016) doi:10.1038/nchem.2480 Published online 04 April 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

Buckydiamondoids steer electron flow

One doesn’t usually think about buckyballs (Buckminsterfullerenes) and diamondoids as being together in one molecule but that has not stopped scientists from trying to join them and, in this case, successfully. From a Sept. 9, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

Scientists have married two unconventional forms of carbon — one shaped like a soccer ball, the other a tiny diamond — to make a molecule that conducts electricity in only one direction. This tiny electronic component, known as a rectifier, could play a key role in shrinking chip components down to the size of molecules to enable faster, more powerful devices.

Here’s an illustration the scientists have provided,

Illustration of a buckydiamondoid molecule under a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). In this study the STM made images of the buckydiamondoids and probed their electronic properties.

Illustration of a buckydiamondoid molecule under a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). In this study the STM made images of the buckydiamondoids and probed their electronic properties.

A Sept. 9, 2014 Stanford University news release by Glenda Chui (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides some information about this piece of international research along with background information on buckyballs and diamondoids (Note: Links have been removed),

“We wanted to see what new, emergent properties might come out when you put these two ingredients together to create a ‘buckydiamondoid,'” said Hari Manoharan of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “What we got was basically a one-way valve for conducting electricity – clearly more than the sum of its parts.”

The research team, which included scientists from Stanford University, Belgium, Germany and Ukraine, reported its results Sept. 9 in Nature Communications.

Many electronic circuits have three basic components: a material that conducts electrons; rectifiers, which commonly take the form of diodes, to steer that flow in a single direction; and transistors to switch the flow on and off. Scientists combined two offbeat ingredients – buckyballs and diamondoids – to create the new diode-like component.

Buckyballs – short for buckminsterfullerenes – are hollow carbon spheres whose 1985 discovery earned three scientists a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Diamondoids are tiny linked cages of carbon joined, or bonded, as they are in diamonds, with hydrogen atoms linked to the surface, but weighing less than a billionth of a billionth of a carat. Both are subjects of a lot of research aimed at understanding their properties and finding ways to use them.

In 2007, a team led by researchers from SLAC and Stanford discovered that a single layer of diamondoids on a metal surface can emit and focus electrons into a tiny beam. Manoharan and his colleagues wondered: What would happen if they paired an electron-emitting diamondoid with another molecule that likes to grab electrons? Buckyballs are just that sort of electron-grabbing molecule.

Details are then provided about this specific piece of research (from the Stanford news release),

For this study, diamondoids were produced in the SLAC laboratory of SIMES researchers Jeremy Dahl and Robert Carlson, who are world experts in extracting the tiny diamonds from petroleum. The diamondoids were then shipped to Germany, where chemists at Justus-Liebig University figured out how to attach them to buckyballs.

The resulting buckydiamondoids, which are just a few nanometers long, were tested in SIMES laboratories at Stanford. A team led by graduate student Jason Randel and postdoctoral researcher Francis Niestemski used a scanning tunneling microscope to make images of the hybrid molecules and measure their electronic behavior. They discovered that the hybrid is an excellent rectifier: The electrical current flowing through the molecule was up to 50 times stronger in one direction, from electron-spitting diamondoid to electron-catching buckyball, than in the opposite direction. This is something neither component can do on its own.

While this is not the first molecular rectifier ever invented, it’s the first one made from just carbon and hydrogen, a simplicity researchers find appealing, said Manoharan, who is an associate professor of physics at Stanford. The next step, he said, is to see if transistors can be constructed from the same basic ingredients.

“Buckyballs are easy to make – they can be isolated from soot – and the type of diamondoid we used here, which consists of two tiny cages, can be purchased commercially,” he said. “And now that our colleagues in Germany have figured out how to bind them together, others can follow the recipe. So while our research was aimed at gaining fundamental insights about a novel hybrid molecule, it could lead to advances that help make molecular electronics a reality.”

Other research collaborators came from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and Kiev Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine. The primary funding for the work came from U.S. the Department of Energy Office of Science (Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Divisions).

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Unconventional molecule-resolved current rectification in diamondoid–fullerene hybrids by Jason C. Randel, Francis C. Niestemski,    Andrés R. Botello-Mendez, Warren Mar, Georges Ndabashimiye, Sorin Melinte, Jeremy E. P. Dahl, Robert M. K. Carlson, Ekaterina D. Butova, Andrey A. Fokin, Peter R. Schreiner, Jean-Christophe Charlier & Hari C. Manoharan. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 4877 doi:10.1038/ncomms5877 Published 09 September 2014

This paper is open access. The scientists provided not only a standard illustration but a pretty picture of the buckydiamondoid,

Caption: An international team led by researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University joined two offbeat carbon molecules -- diamondoids, the square cages at left, and buckyballs, the soccer-ball shapes at right -- to create "buckydiamondoids," center. These hybrid molecules function as rectifiers, conducting electrons in only one direction, and could help pave the way to molecular electronic devices. Credit: Manoharan Lab/Stanford University

Caption: An international team led by researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University joined two offbeat carbon molecules — diamondoids, the square cages at left, and buckyballs, the soccer-ball shapes at right — to create “buckydiamondoids,” center. These hybrid molecules function as rectifiers, conducting electrons in only one direction, and could help pave the way to molecular electronic devices.
Credit: Manoharan Lab/Stanford University