The fabrication of nanogap electrodes using nanoskiving

The aim of this research is to provide a simple nanofabrication method to construct molecular tunneling junctions. We developed a new method to fabricate nanogap electrodes using nanoskiving - a form of edge lithography. This powerful new tool enables us to circumvent the limitations that exist in the field of molecular electronics: fabricating electrodes with precise control over the gap size while producing them in numbers. We showed that we can fabricate these tunneling devices on bench top with the rate of one per second with control over all dimensions of the fabricated electrodes. We fabricated SAM-Templated Addressable Nanogap (STAN) electrodes using this bottom-up approach. The sub-3 nm gap size is dened by the molecules that serve as the gap template. Since we use alkanedithiols as the gap template, angstrom level resolution of the gap (i.e., a carbon-carbon bond) is achievable. Furthermore, due to the high aspect ratio of the STANs we can directly address them and connect them to the probes for electrical characterization. We believe that our simple, fast and inexpensive tool is a promising approach that lets us fabricate devices on demand to measure tunneling currents through arbitrary molecules (or SAMs). Moreover, the construction of tunneling junctions from arbitrary molecules can be achieved by exchanging the dithiols in the gap with free dithiols from solution. Incorporating arbitrary symmetrical dithiols into STANs using exchange provides a high throughput and generalizable method towards a platform for the measurement of arbitrary molecules with a variety of electrode materials.