We present an original method to estimate the conductivity of a single molecule anchored to nanometric-sized metallic electrodes, using a Mechanically Controlled Break Junction (MCBJ) operated at room temperature in liquid. We record the conductance through the metal / molecules / metal nanocontact while keeping the metallic electrodes at a fixed distance. Taking advantage of thermal diffusion and electromigration, we let the contact naturally explore the more stable configurations around a chosen conductance value. The conductance of a single molecule is estimated from a statistical analysis of raw conductance and conductance standard deviation data for molecular contacts containing up to 14 molecules. The single molecule conductance values are interpreted as time-averaged conductance of an ensemble of conformers at thermal equilibrium.
@article{arxiv.1706.09818,
title = {Estimating single molecule conductance from spontaneous evolution of a molecular contact},
author = {M. Gil and T. Malinowski and M. Iazykov and H. Klein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.09818},
year = {2018}
}