A scanning tunnelling microscope is used to pull a polythiophene wire from a Au(111) surface while measuring the current traversing the junction. Abrupt current increases measured during the lifting procedure are associated to the detachment of molecular sub-units, in apparent contradiction with the expected exponential decrease of the conductance with wire length. \textit{Ab initio} simulations reproduce the experimental data and demonstrate that this unexpected behavior is due to release of mechanical stress in the wire, paving the way to mechanically gated single-molecule electronic devices.
@article{arxiv.1506.05653,
title = {Pulling and Stretching a Molecular Wire to Tune its Conductance},
author = {Gaël Reecht and Hervé Bulou and Fabrice Scheurer and Virginie Speisser and Fabrice Mathevet and César González and Yannick J. Dappe and Guillaume Schull},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.05653},
year = {2015}
}