Vibrationally Mediated Control of Single Electron Transmission in Weakly Coupled Molecule-Metal Junctions

Abstract

We propose a mechanism which allows one to control the transmission of single electrons through a molecular junction. The principle utilizes the emergence of transmission sidebands when molecular vibrational modes are coupled to the electronic state mediating the transmission. We will show that if a molecule-metal junction is biased just below a molecular resonance one may induce the transmission of a single electron by externally exciting a vibrational mode of the molecule. The analysis is quite general but requires that the molecular orbital does not hybridize strongly with the metallic states. As an example we perform a density functional theory (DFT) analysis of a benzene molecule between two Au(111) contacts and show that exciting a particular vibrational mode can give rise to transmission of a single electron

References in corpus (10)

• Molecular Transport Junctions: Vibrational Effects
• Inelastic transport theory from first-principles: methodology and applications for nanoscale devices
• Inelastic electron tunneling via molecular vibrations in single-molecule transistors
• Franck-Condon blockade in suspended carbon nanotube quantum dots
• Vibrational sidebands and dissipative tunneling in molecular transistors
• Tunneling in suspended carbon nanotubes assisted by longitudinal phonons
• Delta Self-Consistent Field as a method to obtain potential energy surfaces of excited molecules on surfaces
• Hot electron mediated desorption rates calculated from excited state potential energy surfaces
• Inelastic Scattering in Metal-H2-Metal Junctions
• Inelastic scattering in a local polaron model with quadratic coupling to bosons