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Wenhui Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Wenhui Fang.

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Engineering Molecular Rectification: Mechanisms, Modulation Strategies, and Device Integration

Molecular rectifiers, as prototypical components of molecular electronics, present unique opportunities for pushing device miniaturization to its ultimate limits. Nevertheless, challenges including limited rectification ratios (RR), insufficient robustness, and poor reproducibility impede their practical deployment. To make molecular rectifiers competitive with silicon-based devices, it is important to fully understand the design principles and fabrication methods from both mechanistic and experimental perspectives. By holistically considering the transport mechanisms, modulation strategies, fabrication, characterization techniques, and theoretical simulations, this review provides a comprehensive overview of molecular rectifiers. Representative examples of conceptually significant and high-performance molecular rectifier systems are highlighted to illustrate the relationships between rectification mechanisms, molecular design strategies, and device realization. Building on these discussions, we present an outlook for current bottlenecks and future directions to guide the development of molecular rectifiers. This review aims to serve as both a conceptual framework and a technical reference for researchers working at the intersection of molecular electronics and nanoscale device engineering in the post-CMOS era.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Selective Fermi-Level Pinning: A Design Strategy for Giant Rectification in Molecular Junctions

Molecular rectifiers are key functional components of molecular-scale integrated circuits, yet achieving high rectification ratios remains a longstanding challenge due to the intrinsic symmetry of resonant tunneling and the complexity of interfacial energy-level alignment. Here, we propose a rectifier design strategy based on selective Fermi-level pinning that breaks transport symmetry via pinning interactions between molecular frontier orbitals and electrodes. This framework enforces tunneling transport to be predominantly governed by unoccupied molecular orbitals, while substantially suppressing contributions from occupied states, thereby establishing a simplified and highly controllable rectification mechanism. The resulting cyclo[n]carbon-based molecular junctions exhibit giant rectification ratios exceeding 103, while retaining exceptional structural robustness against variations in both donor chain length and carbon ring size. This work reveals the critical role of selective Fermi-level pinning in molecular junctions and provides a general design principle for engineering functional single-molecule electronic devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall

Termination-Preserved Ultra-high Tunneling Magnetoresistance in Altermagnetic KV2Se2O

Altermagnets exhibit nonrelativistic spin splitting without net magnetization, establishing a new platform for next-generation spintronic devices. Although altermagnetic tunnel junctions (AMTJs) represent the most promising realizations, their practical applications are hindered by low tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) ratios and strong sensitivity to interfacial configurations. Here, we systematically explore the transport properties and microscopic mechanisms of AMTJs based on the recently discovered d-wave altermagnet KV2Se2O. Using first-principles calculations and orbital-resolved analysis, we demonstrate that the synergy between compressed nodal-point like spin-degenerate channels and coplanar interfacial magnetic order yields an ultra-high intrinsic TMR above 105% for all interfacial terminations. More importantly, K-termination effectively preserves bulk spin polarization through its unique passivation characteristics, leading to an ultra-high TMR up to 1012%. These results identify the coupling between momentum-space topology and interfacial passivation provides a reliable strategy for realizing giant magnetoresistive responses in altermagnetic spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci