While macroscopic motors react to a directed driving force with a directed motion, thermal energy washes over state population in any machines at the nanoscale resulting in brownian motion. Besides the astonishing variety of biological molecular machines, artificial molecular motors are still rare.
We intend to establish new driving forces for actuating nanoscale devices exploiting the spin angular momentum of an electric current.

Within the master thesis, suitable molecular complexes will be studied in our low temperature scanning tunneling microscope which allows to accurately approach single molecules.

The master thesis includes sample preparation, STM experiments, data analysis and a close collaboration with the synthetic chemistry group.