On the origin of multilevel conductance and memory in ultrathin organic films

Conductivity of certain organic molecules switch to a high-state via electroreduction. Different high-states or multilevel conductivity in organics has been due to different density of high-conducting molecules in a device. We have studied how the population distribution of reduced molecules changes in achieving different conductivity levels. In devices based on a few molecular layers, we have observed that the number of conductivity levels can exceed the number of Langmuir–Blodgett layers. The results showed that the distribution of high-conducting molecules did not increase layer-by-layer, but throughout the volume of the device enabling large number of conductivity levels for higher level (multibit) applications.