Aug 2012
Best Poster Award for Janine Wilbers at the INASCON2012 conference with the poster titled “The Flip chip concept: A new way to electrically characterize molecular monolayers”
INASCON 2012
The International Nanoscience Student Conference (INASCON) is an annual conference organized by students for students who are doing research within different fields of nanotechnology. It is aimed to bring students from whole Europe together to present and discuss their projects. All participants are expected to present their work either in the form of a poster or a talk.
INASCON was established in 2007 at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 2010 the conference was organized by a group of Master Nanotechnology students from the University of Twente.
This year INASCON took place at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany (August 3 -5, 2012).
Content of the paper
The biggest challenge in the fabrication of molecular monolayer junctions is the application of the top contacts without damaging the molecules. To allow statistical analysis of the molecular junctions they have to yield reliable and reproducible results. There are already several techniques for the fabrication of molecular junctions, but all of them have their own disadvantages like low yields or uncertainties in the junction system when an additional layer is introduced between the molecules and the top electrode. Until now no successful fabrication technique has been reported without a non-metallic layer between the molecules and the top contact.
On the poster titled “The Flip chip concept: A new way to electrically characterize molecular monolayers” a new fabrication method was shown to electrically characterize large area metal-molecular monolayer-metal junctions. Hereby, metallic top contacts are gently applied by a water-based method on top of the molecular monolayers which is very important in order to avoid damage of the molecules. Au-alkanethiol monolayer-Au molecular junctions were electrically characterized and an exponential dependence of the current density as a function of chain length of the alkanethiols was observed, in agreement with earlier studies.