Effects of End Termination on Electronic Transport in a Molecular Switch

Based on the non-equilibrium Green's function formalism and first-principles calculations, we investigate the electronic transport properties of an anthracene-based molecular switch with two carbon nanotube electrodes. Our results show that different terminations at the carbon nanotube end strongly affect the transport properties of the switch. In the case of H-termination the current at low biases is dominated by non-resonant tunneling. In the N-termination case the current at low biases is dominated by quasi-resonant tunneling and is increased by several orders of magnitude. The enhancement is discussed by the molecular projected self-consistent Hamiltonian level, transmission function, and local density of states.