Concepts in Single‐Molecule Electronics

Abstract Molecular electronics is an exciting and rapidly evolving field of research. Since the first notion of single‐molecular electronics, an ever‐growing number of possible functional molecules have been proposed. This chapter provides a short overview on the recent development of molecular electronics, beginning with a short theoretical introduction in which the basic concepts and terminology of molecular electronics are explained. Subsequently, several techniques to contact single molecules and to measure the current transport across these molecules are described. There follows a description of various compounds that have been shown to exhibit electronic functionality and possible circuits, and architectures that are suited for molecular electronics are introduced. Finally, a brief overview is provided of the main future challenges of molecular electronics.