Theoretical study of electron transport along self-assembled graphitic nanowires

Electron transport through stacks of polyaromatic hydrocarbons is studied theoretically using the Landauer formalism. The polyaromatic hydrocarbons can be synthesized in many different sizes and can form molecular stacks with a varying number of molecules and with a rather strong π-overlap along the stack. This allows for a large flexibility in the nanostructure of these materials and makes it possible to study the variation in the conductance with a number of different factors: a near-linear increase in the conductance as a function of the number of atoms in the individual molecule is observed. Furthermore, the conductance drops exponentially with the number of molecules in the stacks, from which it follows that an increase in the intermolecular hopping results in an increase in the conductance which is proportional to the intermolecular hopping to the power of 2( N -1), where N is the number of molecules in the stack.