Marc Baldo

Introduction Molecular electronics is one of a number of competing approaches to the problem of employing nanotechnology to increase the performance of electronic devices. Molecules possess some potential advantages for nanoelectronics: chemistry offers a unique ability to tailor features at the nanoscale, molecules may be semiconducting, they can de designed to assemble on specific sites in a circuit, and they possess unique properties such as mechanical flexibility that may enable novel devices such as electromechanical switches. But molecular electronics is in its infancy, hampered by a lack of theoretical understanding, and also the fabrication challenge of building and testing molecular scale devices. This work examines various aspects of molecular physics and technology: from prototypical molecular electronic circuits (photosynthetic complexes), to charge transport at metal-molecule interfaces.