No Arabic abstract
Most theoretical studies of nanoscale transport in molecular junctions rely on the combination of the Landauer formalism with Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) using standard local and semilocal functionals to approximate exchange and correlation effects. In many cases, the resulting conductance is overestimated with respect to experiments. Recent works have demonstrated that this discrepancy may be reduced when including many-body corrections on top of DFT. Here we study benzene-dithiol (BDT) gold junctions and analyze the effect of many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) on the calculation of the conductance with respect to different bonding geometries. We find that the many-body corrections to the conductance strongly depend on the metal-molecule coupling strength. In the BDT junction with the lowest coupling, many-body corrections reduce the overestimation on the conductance to a factor two, improving the agreement with experiments. In contrast, in the strongest coupling cases, many-body corrections on the conductance are found to be sensibly smaller and standard DFT reveals a valid approach.
We study the photoluminescence (PL) of a two-dimensional liquid of oriented dipolar excitons in In_{x}Ga_{1-x}As coupled double quantum wells confined to a microtrap. Generating excitons outside the trap and transferring them at lattice temperatures down to T = 240 mK into the trap we create cold quasi-equilibrium bosonic ensembles of some 1000 excitons with thermal de Broglie wavelengths exceeding the excitonic separation. With decreasing temperature and increasing density n <= 5*10^10 cm^{-2} we find an increasingly asymmetric PL lineshape with a sharpening blue edge and a broad red tail which we interpret to reflect correlated behavior mediated by dipolar interactions. From the PL intensity I(E) below the PL maximum at E_{0} we extract at T < 5 K a distinct power law I(E) sim (E_{0}-E)^-|alpha| with -|alpha|sim -0.8 in the range E_{0}-E of 1.5-4 meV, comparable to the dipolar interaction energy.
The conductance of single molecule junctions is calculated using a Landauer approach combined to many-body perturbation theory MBPT) to account for electron correlation. The mere correction of the density-functional theory eigenvalues, which is the standard procedure for quasiparticle calculations within MBPT, is found not to affect noticeably the zero-bias conductance. To reduce it and so improve the agreement with the experiments, the wavefunctions also need to be updated by including the non-diagonal elements of the self-energy operator.
One of the important issues of molecular spintronics is the control and manipulation of charge transport and, in particular, its spin polarization through single-molecule junctions. Using $ab$ $initio$ calculations, we explore spin-polarized electron transport across single benzene derivatives attached with six different anchoring groups (S, CH$_3$S, COOH, CNH$_2$NH, NC and NO$_2$) to Ni(111) electrodes. We find that molecule-electrode coupling, conductance and spin polarization (SP) of electric current can be modified significantly by anchoring groups. In particular, a high spin polarization (SP $>$ 80%) and a giant magnetoresistance (MR $>$ 140%) can be achieved for NO$_2$ terminations and, more interestingly, SP can be further enhanced (up to 90%) by a small voltage. The S and CH$_3$S systems, on the contrary, exhibit rather low SP while intermediate values are found for COOH and CNH$_2$NH groups. The results are analyzed in detail and explained by orbital symmetry arguments, hybridization and spatial localization of frontier molecular orbitals. We hope that our comparative and systematic studies will provide valuable quantitative information for future experimental measurements on that kind of systems and will be useful for designing high-performance spintronics devices.
Negative differential conductance (NDC) is a non-linear transport phenomenon ubiquitous in molecular nanojunctions. Its physical origin can be the most diverse. In rotationally symmetric molecules with orbitally degenerate many-body states, it can be ascribed to interference effects. We establish in this paper a criterion to identify the interference blocking scenario by correlating the spectral and the topographical information achievable in an STM single molecule measurement. Simulations of current voltage characteristics and current maps for a Cu-Phthalocyanine (CuPc) on a thin insulating film are presented as experimentally relevant examples.
Diluted magnetic semiconductors are materials well known to exhibit strong correlations which typically manifest in carrier-mediated magnetic ordering. In this Rapid Communication, we show that the interaction between excitons and magnetic impurities in these materials is even strong enough to cause a significant deviation from the bare exciton picture in linear absorption spectra of quantum well nanostructures. It is found that exciton-impurity correlations induce a characteristic fingerprint in the form of an additional feature close to the exciton resonance in combination with a shift of the main exciton line of up to a few meV. We trace back these features to the form of the self-energy and demonstrate that reliable values of the average correlation energy per exciton can be extracted directly from the spectra. Since the only requirement for our findings is sufficiently strong correlations, the results can be generalized to other strongly correlated systems.