Highly-effective gating of single-molecule junctions: an electrochemical approach.

ABSTRACT

We report an electrochemical gating approach with ∼100% efficiency to tune the conductance of single-molecule 4,4'-bipyridine junctions using scanning-tunnelling-microscopy break junction technique. Density functional theory calculation suggests that electrochemical gating aligns molecular frontier orbitals relative to the electrode Fermi-level, switching the molecule from an off resonance state to "partial" resonance.