Washington, Dec 24 (IANS) Scientists have successfully created the world’s first transistor from a single molecule.
The team, including Mark Reed, professor of engineering & applied science at Yale University, showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

“It’s like rolling a ball up and over a hill, where the ball represents electrical current and the height of the hill represents the molecule’s different energy states,” Reed said.

“We were able to adjust the height of the hill, allowing current to get through when it was low, and stopping the current when it was high.” In this way, the team was able to use the molecule in much the same way as regular transistors are used.

Reed and Takhee Lee, former Yale postdoctoral associate and now professor at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, developed additional techniques over the years that allowed them to “see” what was happening at the molecular level.

Being able to fabricate the electrical contacts on such miniscule scales, identifying the ideal molecules to use, and figuring out where to place them and how to connect them to the contacts were also key components of the discovery.

“There were a lot of technological advances and understanding we built up over many years to make this happen,” Reed said.

There is a lot of interest in using molecules in computer circuits because traditional transistors are not feasible at such small scales, said a Yale release.

But Reed stressed that this is strictly a scientific breakthrough and that practical applications such as smaller and faster “molecular computers” -if possible at all - are many decades away.

“We’re not about to create the next generation of integrated circuits,” he said. “But after many years of work gearing up to this, we have fulfilled a decade-long quest and shown that molecules can act as transistors.”

These findings were published in the Thursday issue of Nature.