Cutting through the noise: Advancing electronics one molecule at a time

Oliver L.A. Monti

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Department of Physics
Affiliate, Applied Mathematics Program
Fellow, Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing

The advent of artificial intelligence and crytpocurrencies, and the increased permeation of the internet in the developing world is making it increasingly clear that the power consumption by electronics and computation poses a new challenge to efforts for reducing green house gas emissions. Among the many pathways to creating devices with increased computational power and dramatically reduced power consumption, the notion of reducing transistors to their most basic scale is attractive. We and others have shown that it is indeed possible to measure current through one molecule at a time, and in some instances even to gate it, the two requirements for creating single molecule transistors. Understanding quantum transport at that scale has, however, turned out to be a significant challenge, in part driven by the data structure obtained from single molecule transport experiments.

In this talk, I will discuss several different approaches developed in LabMonti^TM that attempt to deal with the noisy data from single molecule transport studies. I will show that different statistical techniques are able to tease out key microscopic properties needed to develop a first principles understanding of quantum transport in single molecules, ranging from clustering approaches to inferring molecular stability from transport data.