Thermoelectric properties of vibrating molecule asymmetrically connected to the electrodes

Abstract

Here we present a theoretical analysis of inelastic effects on thermoelectric properties of molecular-scale junction in both linear and nonlinear response regimes. Considered device is composed of molecular quantum dot (with discrete energy levels) asymmetrically connected to metallic electrodes (treated within the wide-band approximation) via potential barriers, where molecular vibrations are modeled as dispersionless phonon excitations. Nonperturbative computational scheme, used in this work, is based on Green's function theory within the framework of polaron transformation (GFT-PT) which maps the many-body electron-phonon interaction problem into a one-body multi-channel single-electron scattering problem. It is shown that all the thermoelectric characteristics are dominated by quantum transport of virtual polarons due to a strong electron-phonon coupling.

11 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Thermoelectric effect in molecular electronics
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• Theory of Vibrationally Inelastic Electron Transport through Molecular Bridges
• Current hysteresis and memory effect in a molecular quantum dot with strong electron-vibron interaction
• Thermoelectric effect in molecular junctions: A tool for revealing transport mechanisms
• Shot noise of inelastic tunneling through quantum dot systems
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• Electrothermal Transistor Effect and Cyclic Electronic Currents in Multithermal Charge Transfer Networks
• Thermopower of molecular junctions: Tunneling to hopping crossover in DNA
• The effect of fluctuations - thermal and otherwise - on the temperature dependence of thermopower in aromatic chain single-molecule junctions
• Thermally induced charge current through long molecules