Conduction mechanism in assemblies of metal nanoparticles linked by organic molecules

Full text: We have investigated theoretically and experimentally electron transport through thin films of gold nanoparticles which are linked by alkanedithiol molecules of different chain lengths. We find that conduction between neighbouring nanoparticles takes place by electron tunnelling along weakly conducting organic linker molecules. Using a tight binding model for the alkanedithiol molecules to describe the tunnelling process we predict the conductivity to decrease exponentially with the length of the molecules. During tunnelling the electron has to overcome a charging energy due to the electron-hole interaction between tunnelling electrons and the corresponding holes left behind on the donor nanoparticle. Experimentally we find that large applied voltages cause nonlinear I-V characteristics and that the temperature dependence of the conductivity does not show Arrhenius behaviour but instead is of the form exp[-(Eo/kT)1/2]. Using percolation theory for a network of metal nanoparticles separated by barriers we show that strong disorder caused by variations in nanoparticle size and linker length as well as randomly trapped electric charges on the linker molecules can well explain our experimental data