Fundamentals of molecular electronics: Switching molecules by electrons or light

Abstract:
Molecular electronics offers a promising way for constructing nanoelectronic devices with faster performance and smaller dimensions. Thereby, switches are essential as basic components for both storage and logical operations. The main requirements for a switch are reversibility and bistability. This necessitates the existence of two different thermally stable forms with different physico-chemical properties that may be changed repeatedly from one state to the other through an external stimulus. Since isomers may differ significantly in physical and chemical properties, isomerisation opens a way for a molecular switch. In this talk, I review our results on isomerisation reactions of single molecules adsorbed on surfaces investigated with a low temperature scanning tunnelling microscope.