Theory of the Franck-Condon blockade regime

Abstract

Strong coupling of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom entails a low-bias suppression of the current through single-molecule devices, termed Franck-Condon blockade. In the limit of slow vibrational relaxation, transport in the Franck-Condon-blockade regime proceeds via avalanches of large numbers of electrons, which are interrupted by long waiting times without electron transfer. The avalanches consist of smaller avalanches, leading to a self-similar hierarchy which terminates once the number of transferred electrons per avalanche becomes of the order of unity. Experimental signatures of self-similar avalanche transport are strongly enhanced current (shot) noise, as expressed by giant Fano factors, and a power-law noise spectrum. We develop a theory of the Franck-Condon-blockade regime with particular emphasis on effects of electron cotunneling through highly excited vibrational states. As opposed to the exponential suppression of sequential tunneling rates for low-lying vibrational states, cotunneling rates suffer only a power-law suppression. This leads to a regime where cotunneling dominates the current for any gate voltage. Including cotunneling within a rate-equation approach to transport, we find that both the Franck-Condon blockade and self-similar avalanche transport remain intact in this regime. We predict that cotunneling leads to absorption-induced vibrational sidebands in the Coulomb-blockaded regime as well as intrinsic telegraph noise near the charge degeneracy point.

20 pages, 10 figures; minor changes, version published in Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (8)

• Franck-Condon blockade and giant Fano factors in transport through single molecules
• The Kondo effect in C${}_{60}$ single-molecule transistors
• Electrical generation and absorption of phonons in carbon nanotubes
• Vibrational sidebands and dissipative tunneling in molecular transistors
• Current-induced nonequilibrium vibrations in single-molecule devices
• Vibrational Sidebands and Kondo-effect in Molecular Transistors
• Full counting statistics of strongly non-Ohmic transport through single molecules
• Effects of charge-dependent vibrational frequencies and anharmonicities in transport through molecules

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