Abstract
As system complexity increases, in either biological or synthetic molecules, an understanding of structure-function relationships makes it possible to identify the essential functional units controlling physical properties from what may be a vast sea of spectator components. Until recently, the range of theoretical tools that have been implemented for elucidating structure-function relationships in molecular electron transport have been limited, and consequently, the ability to build chemical intuition for the behaviour of complex systems has also been limited. Here we present our efforts developing a local description of molecular electron transport, which has allowed us to map the interactions in a molecule that mediate the tunnelling current in a range of chemically interesting molecules. With this description of the local transport, we can understand the behaviour of a complex, fluctuating system as a force is applied that induces conformational change. We can isolate the interactions in the molecule responsible for high or low currents and can use this information to refine the system design.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ ERC Grant agreement n\(\circ \) 258806 and The Danish Council for Independent Research | Natural Sciences.
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Solomon, G.C. (2013). Mapping Electron Transport Pathways in Complex Systems. In: Lorente, N., Joachim, C. (eds) Architecture and Design of Molecule Logic Gates and Atom Circuits. Advances in Atom and Single Molecule Machines. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33137-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33137-4_4
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