Exploring Charge Transport across various doped Bio films and Inorganic Quantum Dots

Abstract

In recent decades, interest in molecular electronics has grown and the fundamental step in the study of molecular electronics is the creation of metal/molecules/metal junctions where major advancement is visible, be it in theory or experiments. The study of charge transport through biomolecular junctions is the primary topic of this thesis. The biological world is governed by processes that depend on the conduction of ions and electrons through various length scales. The nano/ microscales have been the focus of multidisciplinary efforts to clarify the physics and chemistry of electron, proton, and ion transfer in biological processes. newlineBuilding dependable, repeatable metal/molecules/metal devices is fundamental in researching bio-molecular electronics. The thesis mainly studies charge transport through various biomolecules integrated with molecular devices. We developed a novel technique for creating self-assembled bio-molecular devices with electrical contacts and investigated the possibilities of managing, safeguarding, and switching these systems. Our work aims to establish a reliable method for studying the charge transport across bio-molecules, for which we have developed strategies to prepare soft electrical contact fabrication on the self-assembled monolayers on silicon or gold/silver thin films. For example, the top electrodes could be a drop of E-GaIn from the Hamilton syringe or a manually placed drop from a 10 and#956;l micropipette. We have also developed a PDMS microchannel filled with E-GaIn for more sensitive temperature-dependent electrical measurements. We placed the PDMS microchannel filled with E-GaIn on top of the self-assembled layers and obtained the electrical transport characteristics across various protein molecules. newlineWe have explored electrical transport across both Bovine serum albumin (BSA) and inorganic doped BSA to understand the effect of doping. In contrast, due to light harvesting properties, we explored phycobiliproteins (PBPs) for optoelectronic studies. When exposed to low-intensity wh