Long-Range Resonant Charge Transport through Open-Shell Donor–Acceptor Macromolecules

Abstract

A grand challenge in molecular electronics is the development of molecular materials that can facilitate efficient long-range charge transport. Research spanning more than two decades has been fueled by the prospects of creating a new generation of miniaturized electronic technologies based on molecules whose synthetic tunability offers tailored electronic properties and functions unattainable with conventional electronic materials. However, current design paradigms produce molecules that exhibit off-resonant transport under low bias, which limits the conductance of molecular materials to unsatisfactorily low levels─several orders of magnitude below the conductance quantum 1 G₀─and often results in an exponential decay in conductance with length. Here, we demonstrate a chemically robust, air-stable, and highly tunable molecular wire platform comprised of open-shell donor–acceptor macromolecules that exhibit remarkably high conductance close to 1 G₀ over a length surpassing 20 nm under low bias, with no discernible decay with length. Single-molecule transport measurements and ab initio calculations show that the ultralong-range resonant transport arises from extended π-conjugation, a narrow bandgap, and diradical character, which synergistically enables excellent alignment of frontier molecular orbitals with the electrode Fermi energy. The implementation of this long-sought-after transport regime within molecular materials offers new opportunities for the integration of manifold properties within emerging nanoelectronic technologies.