The newest research results of researchers of the Wigner Research Center for Physics, Krisztián Palotás and Levente Rózsa, in collaboration with the Technical University of Ilmenau have been published in the leading international scientific journal Nano Letters. They studied the interaction of the magnetic moment of a molecule with a superconducting lead substrate upon sequential chemical modifications of the molecule induced by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. A distance change of only 8 picometers, one ten-millionth of the diameter of the human hair, between the magnetic cobalt center of the molecule and the lead substrate resulted in a significant change of the measured tunneling spectrum of the molecule. The researchers of the Wigner RCP contributed to the understanding of the remarkable experimental results of the German partner by theoretical calculations. The results might lead to new developments and applications in various fields of surface physics and chemistry, e.g., in surface chemical reactions, in (molecular) nanoelectronic devices or in ultra-sensitive detectors. The illustration about the discovery was selected for a cover page of the journal.
One of the cover pages of the 22 February 2023 issue of Nano Letters illustrates the discovered effect, which was prepared by Stefan Schulte (Ilmenau).
Link to the original publication: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c03952
