Role of electronic structure in photoassisted transport through atomic-sized contacts

Abstract

We study theoretically quantum transport through laser-irradiated metallic atomic-sized contacts. The radiation field is treated classically, assuming its effect to be the generation of an ac voltage over the contact. We derive an expression for the dc current and compute the linear conductance in one-atom thick contacts as a function of the ac frequency, concentrating on the role played by electronic structure. In particular, we present results for three materials (Al, Pt, and Au) with very different electronic structures. It is shown that, depending on the frequency and the metal, the radiation can either enhance or diminish the conductance. This can be intuitively understood in terms of the energy dependence of the transmission of the contacts in the absence of radiation.

arXiv comment7 pages, 7 figures; four new figures added

References in corpus (15)

• Time-dependent transport in interacting and non-interacting mesoscopic systems
• Quantum properties of atomic-sized conductors
• Driven quantum transport on the nanoscale
• Applications of a tight-binding total energy method for transition and noble metals: Elastic Constants, Vacancies, and Surfaces of Monatomic Metals
• Photon-assisted transport in semiconductor nanostructures
• Current partition: Nonequilibrium Green's function Approach
• Scattering Theory of Photon-Assisted Electron Transport
• Electron-vibration interaction in transport through atomic gold wires
• Structure and conductance histogram of atomic-sized Au contacts
• Current induced light emission and light induced current in molecular tunneling junctions
• Theoretical analysis of the conductance histograms and structural properties of Ag, Pt and Ni nanocontacts
• Subharmonic Shapiro steps and assisted tunneling in superconducting point contacts
• Superconducting atomic contacts under microwave irradiation
• Truncation method for Green's functions in time-dependent fields
• Theoretical study of photon emission from molecular wires

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Optical Rectification and Field Enhancement in a Plasmonic Nanogap
• Length-dependent conductance and thermopower in single-molecule junctions of dithiolated oligophenylene derivatives
• Cluster-based density-functional approach to quantum transport through molecular and atomic contacts
• Nonlinear Optical Rectennas
• Influence of chopped laser light onto the electronic transport through atomic-sized contacts
• Modeling elastic and photoassisted transport in organic molecular wires: length dependence and current-voltage characteristics
• Linear optical response of current-carrying molecular junction: A NEGF-TDDFT approach
• Molecular dynamics study of the thermopower of Ag, Au, and Pt nanocontacts
• Photoconductance of organic single-molecule contacts
• Optical wireless link between a nanoscale antenna and a transducing rectenna
• Thermal conductance of metallic atomic-size contacts: Phonon transport and Wiedemann-Franz law
• Optical Rectification and Thermal Currents in Optical Tunneling Gap Antennas
• Hierarchical quantum master equation approach to charge transport in molecular junctions with time-dependent molecule-lead coupling strengths
• Photon-assisted electronic and spin transport in a junction containing precessing molecular spin
• Higher harmonics and ac transport from time dependent density functional theory
• Phononic heat conductance of gold atomic contacts: Coherent versus incoherent transport