Electrical conduction through self-assembled monolayers in molecular junctions: Au/molecules/Au versus Au/molecule/PEDOT:PSS/Au

We fabricated and characterized a large number of octanedithiol (denoted as DC8) molecular devices as vertical metal–molecule–metal structure with or without using an intermediate conducting polymer layer of poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) stabilized with poly(4-styenesulfonic acid) (called as PEDOT:PSS). The electronic transport properties of DC8 molecular devices with and without PEDOT:PSS layer were statistically compared in terms of current density and device yield. The yields of the working molecular devices were found to be ~ 1.75% (84 out of 4800 devices) for Au/DC8/Au junctions and ~ 58% (74 out of 128 devices) for Au–DC8/PEDOT:PSS/Au junctions. The tunneling decay constants were obtained with the Simmons tunneling model and a multibarrier tunneling model for two kinds of molecular devices with and without PEDOT:PSS layer.