Start of funding 01.07.2008

Instrumentation for the study of opto-electronic properties of individual molecules

Dr. J. Reichert
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Physik E20

Dr. Alexander Weber-Bargioni
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Molecular Foundry



Plasmonic nanoantennas are a revolutionary tool to focus visible light down to the 10nm regime - and thereby substantially past the diffraction limit. This improves drastically the coupling efficiency and optical field intensities relative to conventional Near Field Optical techniques. The goal of this cooperation is to establish a novel instrumentation for reproducibly measuring electronic transport through single molecules while simultaneously coupling light into these molecules, thus allowing us to investigate the interaction of individual photons with molecular electronic states. It is therefore crucial to combine advanced near field optical methods with the most reliable techniques for measuring transport characteristics through individual molecules. Therefore we want to combine the expertise at LBL and TUM by placing optical antennas on conventional Near Field probes that have successfully been used in the past to investigate single molecule junctions.