Recent work by Professors San-Huang Ke, Harold Baranger and Weitao Yang provides a new look at the contacts between conjugated molecules and metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes. Their research, which is featured on the cover of the Oct 5 issue of Physical Review Letters, shows that the overall conjugation required for good contact transparency is broken by connecting through a six-member ring on the tube. To achieve full conjugation and hence near perfect contact transparency by an all-carbon contact, they designed a five-member ring leads for different conjugated molecular bridges, leading to high transparency in electrical conduction--a critical attribute for molecular electronic applications. More details of the work, which combines a Landauer approach with ab initio density functional theory, can be found in the published article.
