i don't have at hand a specific paper - you can look though at the press release hp offered about one year ago - or perhaps two - announcing that filaments of metal , just as was suggested in meetings, was behind the phenomenon, not molecules.
you might also look up the debate initiated by ed chandross of bell labs a few years ago - he demanded accountability of people making unfounded claims. look also at a widely read and cited opinion by paul weiss, published in science i think.
the work of our own that i was referring to was the work that started this discussion on slashdot. published last thursday in nature.
interesting discussion.
our paper actually goes well beyond the HP work mentioned above. in fact, if you read further on the HP work, you will see that they eventually discovered, as many suspoected, that they had no (active) molecules in their device. the rotoxane, while a brilliant achievement of chemical synthesis, played no role in the observed current voltage spectra. so detailed characterization is very important. in the work we published today, for the first time it is possible to say definitively that one molecule is characterised - not more or less than one. we know where every atom is and we know the congifuration of the molecule. the other key to this work is that we have managed to make two electrodes serve as three. that is a crucial step as there isn't room to have three fine probes converge on a volume the size of a molecule lke styrene. the key is in the ability to charge one single silicon surface atom, with one single electron, near the one single molecule. the result is like a conventional field effect transistor. it is a robust effect that works at room T - unlike say the break junction work at cornell.
i hope that helps answer some of the questions.
Slashdot Mirror
i don't have at hand a specific paper - you can look though at the press release hp offered about one year ago - or perhaps two - announcing that filaments of metal , just as was suggested in meetings, was behind the phenomenon, not molecules.
you might also look up the debate initiated by ed chandross of bell labs a few years ago - he demanded accountability of people making unfounded claims. look also at a widely read and cited opinion by paul weiss, published in science i think.
the work of our own that i was referring to was the work that started this discussion on slashdot. published last thursday in nature.
interesting discussion. our paper actually goes well beyond the HP work mentioned above. in fact, if you read further on the HP work, you will see that they eventually discovered, as many suspoected, that they had no (active) molecules in their device. the rotoxane, while a brilliant achievement of chemical synthesis, played no role in the observed current voltage spectra. so detailed characterization is very important. in the work we published today, for the first time it is possible to say definitively that one molecule is characterised - not more or less than one. we know where every atom is and we know the congifuration of the molecule. the other key to this work is that we have managed to make two electrodes serve as three. that is a crucial step as there isn't room to have three fine probes converge on a volume the size of a molecule lke styrene. the key is in the ability to charge one single silicon surface atom, with one single electron, near the one single molecule. the result is like a conventional field effect transistor. it is a robust effect that works at room T - unlike say the break junction work at cornell. i hope that helps answer some of the questions.