Conductance of single cobalt chalcogenide cluster junctions

Understanding the electrical properties of semiconducting quantum dot devices have been limited due to the variability of their size/composition and the chemistry of ligand/electrode binding. Furthermore, to probe their electrical conduction properties and its dependence on ligand/electrode binding, measurements must be carried out at the single dot/cluster level. Herein we report scanning tunneling microscope based break junction measurements of cobalt chalcogenide clusters with Te, Se and S to probe the conductance properties. Our measured conductance trends show that the Co–Te based clusters have the highest conductance while the Co-S clusters the lowest. These trends are in very good agreement with cyclic voltammetry measurements of the first oxidation potentials and with density functional theory calculations of their HOMO–LUMO gaps.