Disorder and dephasing effect on electron transport through conjugated molecular wires in molecular junctions

Abstract

Understanding electron transport processes in molecular wires connected between contacts is a central focus in the field of molecular electronics. Especially, the dephasing effect causing tunneling-to-hopping transition has great importance from both applicational and fundamental points of view. We analyzed coherent and incoherent electron transmission through conjugated molecular wires by means of density-functional tight-binding theory within the D'Amato-Pastawski model. Our approach can study explicitly the structure/transport relationship in molecular junctions in a dephasing environmental condition using only single dephasing parameter. We investigated the length dependence and the influence of thermal fluctuations on transport and reproduced the well-known tunneling-to-hopping transition. This approach will be a powerful tool for the interpretation of recent conductance measurements of molecular wires.

6 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (3)

• Energy Gaps in Graphene Nanoribbons
• Effect of Dephasing on Electron Transport in a Molecular Wire: Green's Function Approach
• Crucial role of decoherence for electronic transport in molecular wires: Polyaniline as a case study

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