A Mechanical Single-molecule Potentiometer Based on Foldamer

Molecular potentiometers that can indicate displacement-conductance relationship and predict the molecular conductance are of significant importance towards the real application of molecule-based devices but rarely developed so far. To this end, Li et al. design a single-molecule potentiometer based on ortho-pentaphenylene derivatives. They demonstrated that these pseudoelastic molecules can be stretched and compressed by the mechanical force of the Au electrode along with a dramatically variable conductance by up to two orders of magnitude, demonstrating the great potential as angstrom-scale single-molecule potentiometers. This work has been published in Nature Communications, 2021.