Phonon effects in molecular transistors: Quantal and classical treatment

By Aditi Mitra, I. Aleiner, A. Millis. 2003

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a comprehensive theoretical treatment of the effect of electron-phonon interactions on molecular transistors, including both quantal and classical limits. We study both equilibrated and out of equilibrium phonons. We present detailed results for conductance, noise and phonon distribution in two regimes. One involves temperatures large as compared to the rate of electronic transitions on and off the dot; in this limit our approach yields classical rate equations, which are solved numerically for a wide range of parameters. The other regime is that of low temperatures and weak electron-phonon coupling where a perturbative approximation in the Keldysh formulation can be applied. The interplay between the phonon-induced renormalization of the density of states on the quantum dot and the phonon-induced renormalization of the dot-lead coupling is found to be important. Whether or not the phonons are able to equilibrate in a time rapid compared to the transit time of an electron through the dot is found to affect the conductance. Observable signatures of phonon equilibration are presented. We also discuss the nature of the low-T to high-T crossover.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff33db74b59d0c018e4582d37cccd523e91f4f49

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Electrostatic modification of novel materials (2006, background): “Nontrivial interplay between electronic correlations and vibrational effects have been suggested by several groups Braig and Flensberg, 2003; Flensberg, 2003; Cornaglia, Ness, and Grempel, 2004; Mitra, Aleiner, and Millis, 2004 .”
Molecular transport junctions: vibrational effects (2006, methodology): “Other workers, e.g. Král [254] (using a generalization of the linked cluster expansion to non-equilibrium situations 11 ), Flensberg [255] (using the equation of motion approach), Galperin et al [256] (using a small polaron (Lang–Firsov) Hamiltonian transformation within the NEGF framework) and Hyld”