Electron transmission through molecules and molecular interfaces.
By Abraham Nitzan. Annual review of physical chemistry (Print), 2001
808 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Electron transmission through molecules and molecular interfaces has been a subject of intensive research due to recent interest in electron-transfer phenomena underlying the operation of the scanning-tunneling microscope on one hand, and in the transmission properties of molecular bridges between conducting leads on the other. In these processes, the traditional molecular view of electron transfer between donor and acceptor species gives rise to a novel view of the molecule as a current-carrying conductor, and observables such as electron-transfer rates and yields are replaced by the conductivities, or more generally by current-voltage relationships, in molecular junctions. Such investigations of electrical junctions, in which single molecules or small molecular assemblies operate as conductors, constitute a major part of the active field of molecular electronics. In this article I review the current knowledge and understanding of this field, with particular emphasis on theoretical issues. Different approaches to computing the conduction properties of molecules and molecular assemblies are reviewed, and the relationships between them are discussed. Following a detailed discussion of static-junctions models, a review of our current understanding of the role played by inelastic processes, dephasing and thermal-relaxation effects is provided. The most important molecular environment for electron transfer and transmission is water, and our current theoretical understanding of electron transmission through water layers is reviewed. Finally, a brief discussion of overbarrier transmission, exemplified by photoemission through adsorbed molecular layers or low-energy electron transmission through such layers, is provided. Similarities and differences between the different systems studied are discussed.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electrochemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b23cbf592f758224b57bf290cfe3b845d07a4cc5
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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- Advances and challenges in single-molecule electron transport (2019, background): “The formalism (17)-(20) describes a variant of earlier work (Nitzan, 2001) that borrowed established concepts from electron transfer theory, adapting them for 16 transport in molecular junctions.”
- Driven quantum transport on the nanoscale (2004, background): “Two particular problems addressed within model calculations are the conduction mechanism in the presence of electron–phonon coupling[21–23,26–34]and the length dependence of the current–voltage characteristics [20,24].”
- Molecular transport junctions: vibrational effects (2006, background): “These phenomena were discussed by us elsewhere [7, 13] and here we give only a brief overview with emphasis on recent developments.”
- Quantum properties of atomic-sized conductors (2002, background): “The Frst steps have been made [223,489,490,499–501] and the developments in this Feld are so rapid that they deserve a separate review paper, while some reviews have already appeared [502,503].”