Insights into Chemical Bonding Modes and Heat Transport at the Molecular Level

Despite the demand for nanoscale thermal management technologies of material surfaces and interfaces using organic molecules, heat transport properties at the single molecular level remain elusive due to the experimental difficulty of measuring temperature at the nanoscopic scale. Here we show how chemical bonding modes can affect the heat transport properties of single molecules. We focused on four molecular systems: benzylthiol linked to another phenyl group by either a triple (compound 1), double (3), or amide (4) bond and a common linear alkanethiol (2), all of which are nearly identical in molecular length. We prepared binary self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) using 1 as a common reference in combination with 2–4 and investigated their relative heat transport properties using scanning thermal microscopy (SThM). Two-dimensional temperature mapping of the binary SAMs showed that C≡C and C=C bonds provide more effective pathways for heat transport compared to C–C bonds. Since the amide molecule has resonance structures with C=N double bond character, we expected that its heat transport properties would be comparable to those of the thiols containing triple or double bonds. However, the heat transport properties of this molecule prevailed over the others, most likely due to the formation of additional heat transport pathways caused by intermolecular hydrogen bonding. These findings may provide important guidelines for the design of organic materials for nanoscale thermal management.