Study on Charge Transport in Nanoscale Organic Monolayers for Molecular Electronics Using Liquid Phase Electrodes

Incorporation of solid electrodes frequently involves plasma-based processing. The effect of plasma can influence the physical characteristics, depending on the magnitude in plasma. The undesired feature of plasma-induced damage should be prevented in characterizing the ultra-thin materials, such as ultra-thin films and organic monolayers. The current work at first proves the applicability of a liquid phase electrode in the electrical/dielectric properties through comparative work using Al and Hg on ultrathin $Al_2O_3$ films deposited through atomic layer deposition at low temperature: Two types of metals such as Aluminum (Al) and mercury (Hg) were used as electrodes in $Al_2O_3$ thin films in order to investigate the effect of electrode preparation on the current-voltage characteristics and impedance features as a function of thickness in $Al_2O_3$ film thickness. The success of Hg in $Al_2O_3$ thin films is applied to the AC and DC characterization of the organic monolayers obtained using the Langmuir-Blodgett method. From the DC current-voltage characteristics, the diode-like response is found to originate from the bulk response of the organic materials, evidenced by the fact and the capacitance is inversely related to the absolute thickness of organic layers.