Venkataraman Featured in Chemical & Engineering News

Prof. Latha Venkataraman was featured in the article, "Rebooting the molecular computer: The idea of using single molecules as key components in computers has been around for more than 40 years. What progress is it making?" by Mark Peplow in Chemical & Engineering News.

The article states, "Still, researchers have achieved some impressive milestones. In 2015, for example, Latha Venkataraman and Luis M. Campos of Columbia University and Jeffrey B. Neaton of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory unveiled what is arguably the best single-molecule diode ever made (Nat. Nanotechnol. 2015, DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2015.97). Diodes allow current to flow freely in one direction but not in the opposite direction, and the team’s thiophene-based device had a very high on-off ratio of more than 200—meaning 200-fold as many electrons flowed in one direction as the other. The diode relies on a polar solvent, which aligns the molecule’s orbitals so they produce the desired electrical response.

Crucially, Venkataraman’s work has been consistently reproducible, unlike a lot of previous single-molecule work, and has revealed important details about electronic behavior. “She’s one of the top three people in the world at doing these measurements,” Ratner says."

Chemical & Engineering News
Volume 95 Issue 4 | pp. 23-25
Issue Date: January 23, 2017 | Web Date: January 18, 2017
http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i4/Rebooting-molecular-computer.html