Electron transport in nanoscale junctions with local anharmonic modes

Abstract

We study electron transport in nanojunctions in which an electron on a quantum dot or a molecule is interacting with an N-state local impurity, a harmonic ("Holstein") mode, or a two-state system ("spin"). These two models, the Anderson-Holstein model and the spin-fermion model, can be conveniently transformed by a shift transformation into a form suitable for a perturbative expansion in the tunneling matrix element. We explore the current-voltage characteristics of the two models in the limit of high temperature and weak electron-metal coupling using a kinetic rate equation formalism, considering both the case of an equilibrated impurity, and the unequilibrated case. Specifically, we show that the analog of the Franck-Condon blockade physics is missing in the spin-fermion model. We complement this study by considering the low-temperature quantum adiabatic limit of the dissipative spin-fermion model, with fast tunneling electrons and a slow impurity. While a mean-field analysis of the Anderson-Holstein model suggests that nonlinear functionalities, bistability and hysteresis may develop, such effects are missing in the spin-fermion model at the mean-field level.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Full counting statistics of vibrationally-assisted electronic conduction: transport and fluctuations of the thermoelectric efficiency
• The Anderson--Holstein Model in Two Flavors of the Non--Crossing Approximation
• Effects of electron-phonon interaction on thermal and electrical transport through molecular nano-conductors
• Energy current and its statistics in the nonequilibrium spin-boson model: Majorana fermion representation
• Vibrationally dependent electron-electron interactions in resonant electron transport through single-molecule junctions
• Effects of vibrational anharmonicity on molecular electronic conduction and thermoelectric efficiency
• Reconciling perturbative approaches in phonon assisted transport junctions
• The Anderson impurity model out of equilibrium: Assessing the accuracy of simulation techniques with an exact current-occupation relation
• Magnetic field control of the Franck-Condon coupling of few-electron quantum states
• Photoinduced Anomalous Coulomb Blockade and the Role of Triplet States in Electron Transport through an Irradiated Molecular Transistor II: Effects of Electron-Phonon Coupling and Vibrational Relaxation
• A semiclassical nonequilibrium Green's Function approach to electron transport in systems exhibiting electron-phonon couplings