English

Many-body treatment of quantum transport through single molecules

Materials Science 2008-12-12 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We develop a theoretical approach to quantum transport through single conjugated organic molecules that accurately accounts for all molecular excited and ground states via a semi-empirical many-body molecular Hamiltonian. We then calculate the linear and non-linear transport properties of a benzenedithiol molecule covalently bonded to two gold electrodes at room temperature, eliminating all free parameters by comparing the calculated thermopower and linear-conductance with experiment. The resulting `molecular diamond' structure exhibits experimentally observed many-body effects inaccessible to mean-field approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0803.2756,
  title  = {Many-body treatment of quantum transport through single molecules},
  author = {J. P. Bergfield and C. A. Stafford},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0803.2756},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

A revised and significantly expanded treatment is given in arXiv:0812.0867

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:22:41.107Z