Symmetry‐Breaking in Carbon Nanohoops Enables Room‐Temperature Ternary Single‐Molecule Switching
Abstract
Abstract Single‐molecule electronics offers chemically encoded routes to ultra‐dense information processing, yet room‐temperature operation is often limited to binary conductance states due to thermal broadening and electronic averaging. Here we demonstrate robust ternary switching at room temperature using symmetry‐engineered carbon nanohoops. Embedding a pyrene unit into the [12]cycloparaphenylene backbone via a symmetry‐breaking 1,6‐linkage disrupts the electronic equivalence of π –segments and localizes frontier orbitals. Under controlled mechanical elongation in single–molecule junctions, the molecule exhibits three well‐resolved conductance plateaus, each separated by ∼one order of magnitude, affording unambiguous and reproducible readout. First‐principles transport calculations reveal that symmetry‐breaking–induced orbital localization discretizes coherent tunneling pathways, accounting for the observed plateaus. These findings establish molecular symmetry control as a general design principle for room‐temperature multistate charge transport in conjugated macrocycles, opening a pathway to high‐density single‐molecule logic architectures.
Article Details
Authors (10)
Kaili Chang
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190 China
Qing‐Song Deng
State Key Laboratory for Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces and Department of Chemistry College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Xiamen University Xiamen P. R. China
Kai Song
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry
Jia‐Yin Yang
Department of Chemistry College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Xiamen University Xiamen 361005 China
Chengjia Jing
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry
Bingchen Liu
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry
Xuwei Song
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry
Yuan‐Zhi Tan
Department of Chemistry College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Xiamen University Xiamen 361005 China
Daoben Zhu
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry
Yaping Zang
Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids