Symmetry‐Breaking in Carbon Nanohoops Enables Room‐Temperature Ternary Single‐Molecule Switching
Single-molecule electronics offers chemically encoded routes to ultra-dense information processing, yet room-temperature operation is often limited to binary conductance states due to thermal broadening and electronic averaging. Here we demonstrate robust ternary switching at room temperature using symmetry-engineered carbon nanohoops. Embedding a pyrene unit into the [12]cycloparaphenylene backbone via a symmetry-breaking 1,6-linkage disrupts the electronic equivalence of π-segments and localizes frontier orbitals. Under controlled mechanical elongation in single-molecule junctions, the molecule exhibits three well-resolved conductance plateaus, each separated by ∼one order of magnitude, affording unambiguous and reproducible readout. First-principles transport calculations reveal that symmetry-breaking-induced orbital localization discretizes coherent tunneling pathways, accounting for the observed plateaus. These findings establish molecular symmetry control as a general design principle for room-temperature multistate charge transport in conjugated macrocycles, opening a pathway to high-density single-molecule logic architectures.
Authors
- Daoben Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6354-940X)
- Xuwei Song
- Yuan‐Zhi Tan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1268-2761)
- Jingjing Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2751-2930)
- Chengjun Jing (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7145-8607)
- Bingchen Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4136-5375)
- Qingsong Deng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1681-4220)
- Kai Song (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5889-4797)
- Yaping Zang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5665-7605)
- Kaili Chang
Institutions
- Xiamen University (CN)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (CN)
- Institute of Chemistry (CN)
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Angewandte Chemie International Edition
- Published
- 2025-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202519695
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.73