Fig. 3: STM measurements of the conductance of diaryl bullvalenes caught between two gold electrodes at a bias voltage of 50 mV in 1,2,4−trichlorobenzene solution using a tip retraction rate of 0.5 Å ms⁻¹ and sampling rate of 30 kHz.

a Representative conductance traces. Highlighted in red is single molecule plateaus near 100 \(\mu {G}_{0}\), in black the plateaus at near 13 \(\mu {G}_{0}\) and in blue the plateaus near 9 \(\mu {G}_{0}\). b Two-dimensional conductance versus distance histogram of conductances accumulated from 2425 individual traces. The yield of the junctions, those which showed clear plateaus, is 48%; the two-dimensional conductance histograms of the entire 5067 curves collected are shown in the supporting information (Supplementary Fig. 10a). Circles highlight the features that correspond to the those highlighted by arrows in Fig. 3c. c One dimensional conductance histograms, with three conductance signals appearing as peaks near 100 \(\mu {G}_{0}\) (red arrow, \(\eta=3.6\)), 13 \(\mu {G}_{0}\) (black arrow, \(\eta=1.2\)), and 9 \(\mu {G}_{0}\) (blue arrow, \(\eta=1.1\)). d 2D correlation conductance map for the same data used to build the 1D conductance histogram in (c). Intersection regions labelled 1 to 6 correspond to the comparison of the relevant conductance signals at 100, 13, and 9 \(\mu {G}_{0}\): regions 1‒3 form the diagonal that reproduces the 1D-conductance histograms in (c), whilst off-diagonal regions 4‒6 give the strength of the correlation between each two of the three different conductance states. The dark blue colour in (b) represents the absence of data (0 counts) while the red colour represents the maximum counts for accumulated data, as indicated in the colour-bar scale. The light-blue colour in (d) represents the lack of correlation between data while the yellow colour represents the highest correlation.