Studies of Au/SAMs/PEDOT-PSS/Au tunnel junctions

We report on tunneling through thin organic films. Junctions of the form: Au/SAMs/Polymer/Au were prepared on electronic-grade Si substrates with Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAMs) including octanedithiol (HS-C$_{8}$H$_{16}$-SH) and mercaptohexadecanoic (HS-C$_{15}$H$_{30}$-COOH). A transitional conducting polymer film PEDOT-PSS was spun on to the SAMs layer, and junctions were completed with a gold film. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) was employed to monitor the quality of the SAMs films. The electron tunneling properties including dI/dV and d$^{2}$I/dV$^{2}$ versus bias for the SAMs are discussed.