Issue 8, 2019

Thermoelectric properties of oligoglycine molecular wires

Abstract

We have investigated the electrical and thermoelectrical properties of glycine chains with and without cysteine terminal groups. The electrical conductance of (Gly)n, (Gly)nCys and Cys(Gly)nCys molecules (where Gly, Cys represent glycine and cysteine and n = 1–3) was found to decay exponentially with length l as eβl. Our results show that connecting the molecules to gold electrodes via the sulphur atom of the cysteine moiety leads to higher β factors of 1.57 Å−1 and 1.22 Å−1 for (Gly)nCys and Cys(Gly)nCys respectively, while β = 0.92 Å−1 for (Gly)n. We also find that replacing the peptide bond with a methylene group (–CH2–) increases the conductance of (Gly)3Cys. Furthermore, we find the (Gly)1Cys and Cys(Gly)1Cys systems show good thermoelectrical performance, because of their high Seebeck coefficients (∼0.2 mV K−1) induced by the sulphur of the cysteine(s). With the contributions of both electrons and phonons taken into consideration, a high figure of merit ZT = 0.8 is obtained for (Gly)1Cys at room temperature, which increases further with increasing temperature, suggesting that peptide-based SAM junctions are promising candidates for thermoelectric energy harvesting.

Graphical abstract: Thermoelectric properties of oligoglycine molecular wires

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
05 Nov 2018
Accepted
29 Dec 2018
First published
02 Jan 2019
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Nanoscale, 2019,11, 3567-3573

Thermoelectric properties of oligoglycine molecular wires

S. Hou, Q. Wu, H. Sadeghi and C. J. Lambert, Nanoscale, 2019, 11, 3567 DOI: 10.1039/C8NR08878K

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