image: Aurelio Mateo-Alonso is an Ikerbasque research professor seconded to the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country. view more
Credit: UPV/EHU
A group of researchers at the Basque Excellence Research Center into Polymers (POLYMAT), the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the University of Barcelona, the Institute of Bioengineering of Barcelona (IBEC), and the University of Aveiro, and led by Aurelio Mateo-Alonso, the Ikerbasque research professor at POLYMAT, have developed a new suite of molecular wires or nanowires that are opening up new horizons in molecular electronics. The research is being published today in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
The growing demand for increasingly smaller electronic devices is prompting the need to produce circuits whose components are also as small as possible, and this is calling for fresh approaches in their design.
Molecular electronics has sparked great interest because the manufacture of electronic circuits using molecules would entail a reduction in their size. Nanowires are conducting wires on a molecular scale that carry the current inside these circuits. That is why the efficiency of these wires is crucially important.
In fact, one of the main novelties in this new suite of nanowires developed by the group led by Aurelio Mateo lies in their high efficiency, which constitutes a step forward in miniaturizing electronic circuits.
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About the lead researcher
Aurelio Mateo-Alonso (Madrid, 1976) is an Ikerbasque research professor seconded to the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country; he is the leader of POLYMAT's Molecular and Supramolecular Materials group and has an extensive research career behind him. His research work has received national and international recognition through various awards that include the following: the Young Researchers' Award from the University of Trieste (2007); the Eugen-Graetz Award from the University of Freiburg (2009); the Young Researchers' Award from the Royal Spanish Society of Chemistry (2011), and the Young Researchers' Award from the Nanocarbons Division of the American Electrochemical Society (2012). In 2016 he was awarded the prestigious "Consolidator Grant" by the European Research Council (ERC).
Bibliographic reference
Marco Carini, Marta P. Ruiz, Imanol Usabiaga, José A. Fernández, Emilio Cocinero, Manuel Melle-Franco, Ismael Diez-Perez, and Aurelio Mateo-Alonso. High Conductance Values in π-Folded Molecular Junctions. Nature Communications 8, Article number: 15195 (2017). DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS15195.
Journal
Nature Communications