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 (5)

• Energy Gaps in Graphene Nanoribbons
• Ab initio analysis of electron-phonon coupling in molecular devices
• Electron-Phonon interaction and electronic decoherence in molecular conductors
• 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

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Mechanical Tuning of Conductance and Thermopower in Helicene Molecular Junctions
• Transport in a disordered tight-binding chain with dephasing
• Transport Through Self-Assembled Monolayer Molecular Junctions: Role of In-Plane Dephasing
• Controlling charge transport mechanisms in molecular junctions: Distilling thermally-induced hopping from coherent-resonant conduction
• Thermopower of molecular junctions: Tunneling to hopping crossover in DNA
• Inelastic effects in molecular transport junctions: The probe technique at high bias
• Controlled charge and spin current rectifications in a spin polarized device
• From exhaustive simulations to key principles in DNA nanoelectronics
• Quantum coherent control of nonlinear thermoelectric transport in a triple-dot Aharonov-Bohm heat engine
• Decoherent time-dependent transport beyond the Landauer-Büttiker formulation: a quantum-drift alternative to quantum jumps
• Statistical model for the effects of phase and momentum randomization on electron transport
• Engineering magnetoresistance: A new perspective
• Vibronic Dephasing Model for Coherent-to-Incoherent Crossover in DNA
• Environment assisted superballistic scaling of conductance
• Localization under the effect of randomly distributed decoherence
• Nonequilibrium distribution functions in electron transport: Decoherence, energy redistribution and dissipation
• Molecular orbitals of an elastic artificial benzene
• Quantum transport in quasi-periodic lattice systems in presence of Büttiker probes