Laser-induced currents along molecular wire junctions

Abstract

The treatment of the previous paper is extended to molecular wires. Specifically, the effect of electron-vibrational interactions on the electronic transport induced by femtosecond $\omega +2\omega$ laser fields along unbiased molecular nanojunctions is investigated. For this, the photoinduced vibronic dynamics of trans-polyacetylene oligomers coupled to macroscopic metallic leads is followed in a mean-field mixed quantum-classical approximation. A reduced description of the dynamics is obtained by introducing projective lead-molecule couplings and deriving an effective Schrödinger equation satisfied by the orbitals in the molecular region. Two possible rectification mechanisms are identified and investigated. The first one relies on near-resonance photon-absorption and is shown to be fragile to the ultrafast electronic decoherence processes introduced by the wire's vibrations. The second one employs the dynamic Stark effect and is demonstrated to be highly efficient and robust to electron-vibrational interactions.

14 pages, 10 figures. Accepted in J. Chem. Phys

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• The Driven Liouville von Neumann Equation in Lindblad Form
• When can quantum decoherence be mimicked by classical noise?
• Transient Dynamics in Molecular Junctions: Coherent Bichromophoric Molecular Electron Pumps
• Electronic coherence dynamics in trans-polyacetylene oligomers
• Transient currents in a molecular photo-diode
• Hierarchical quantum master equation approach to charge transport in molecular junctions with time-dependent molecule-lead coupling strengths
• Rabi oscillations and photocurrent in quantum-dot tunnelling junctions
• Stark Control of Electrons Across the Molecule-Semiconductor Interface
• Electronic Energy Transfer: Localized Operator Partitioning of Electronic Energy in Composite Quantum Systems
• Zero-bias current induced by periodic drive of any shape
• Tunable laser and photocurrents from linear atomic C chains