We present an extension of the tunneling theory for scanning tunneling microcopy (STM) to include different types of vibrational-electronic couplings responsible for inelastic contributions to the tunnel current in the strong-coupling limit. It allows for a better understanding of more complex scanning tunneling spectra of molecules on a metallic substrate in separating elastic and inelastic contributions. The starting point is the exact solution of the spectral functions for the electronic active local orbitals in the absence of the STM tip. This includes electron-phonon coupling in the coupled system comprising the molecule and the substrate to arbitrary order including the anti-adiabatic strong coupling regime as well as the Kondo effect on a free electron spin of the molecule. The tunneling current is derived in second order of the tunneling matrix element which is expanded in powers of the relevant vibrational displacements. We use the results of an ab-initio calculation for the single-particle electronic properties as an adapted material-specific input for a numerical renormalization group approach for accurately determining the electronic properties of a NTCDA molecule on Ag(111) as a challenging sample system for our theory. Our analysis shows that the mismatch between the ab-initio many-body calculation of the tunnel current in the absence of any electron-phonon coupling to the experiment scanning tunneling spectra can be resolved by including two mechanisms: (i) a strong unconventional Holstein term on the local substrate orbital leads to reduction of the Kondo temperature and (ii) a different electron-vibrational coupling to the tunneling matrix element is responsible for inelastic steps in the $dI/dV$ curve at finite frequencies.
We theoretically analyze a state-of-the-art experimental method based on a combination of electron spin resonance and scanning tunneling microscopy (ESR-STM), to directly probe the spin fluctuations in the Kondo effect. The Kondo impurity is exchange coupled to the probe spin, and the ESR-STM setup detects the small level shifts in the probe spin induced by the spin fluctuations of the Kondo impurity. We use the open quantum system approach by regarding the probe spin as the system and the Kondo impurity spin as the fluctuating bath to evaluate the resonance line shifts in terms of the dynamic spin susceptibility of the Kondo impurity. We consider various common adatoms on surfaces as possible probe spins and estimate the corresponding level shifts. It is found that the sensitivity is most pronounced for the probe spins with transverse magnetic anisotropy.
Near-field heat engines are devices that convert the evanescent thermal field supported by a primary source into usable mechanical energy. By analyzing the thermodynamic performance of three-body near-field heat engines, we demonstrate that the power they supply can be substantially larger than that of two-body systems, showing their strong potential for energy harvesting. Theoretical limits for energy and entropy fluxes in three-body systems are discussed and compared with their corresponding two-body counterparts. Such considerations confirm that the thermodynamic availability in energy-conversion processes driven by three-body photon tunneling can exceed the thermodynamic availability in two-body systems.
Quantum tunneling dominates coherent transport at low temperatures in many systems of great interest. In this work we report a many--body tunneling (MBT), by nonperturbatively solving the Anderson multi-impurity model, and identify it a fundamental tunneling process on top of the well--acknowledged sequential tunneling and cotunneling. We show that the MBT involves the dynamics of doublons in strongly correlated systems. Proportional to the numbers of dynamical doublons, the MBT can dominate the off--resonant transport in the strongly correlated regime. A $T^{3/2}$--dependence of the MBT current on temperature is uncovered and can be identified as a fingerprint of the MBT in experiments. We also prove that the MBT can support the coherent long--range tunneling of doublons, which is well consistent with recent experiments on ultracold atoms. As a fundamental physical process, the MBT is expected to play important roles in general quantum systems.
We consider the effect of electron correlations on tunneling from a 2D electron layer in a magnetic field parallel to the layer. A tunneling electron can exchange its momentum with other electrons, which leads to an exponential increase of the tunneling rate compared to the single-electron approximation. Explicit results are obtained for a Wigner crystal. They provide a qualitative and quantitative explanation of the data on electrons on helium. We also discuss tunneling in semiconductor heterostructures.
We report a detailed study of tunneling spectra measured on 2H-Ta$_x$Nb$_{1-x}$Se$_2$ ($x=0sim 0.1$) single crystals using a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope. The prominent gap-like feature unintelligible for a long time was found to be accompanied by some in-gap fine structures. By investigating the second-derivative spectra and their temperature and magnetic field dependencies, we were able to prove that inelastic electron tunneling is the origin of these features and obtain the Eliashberg function of 2H-Ta$_x$Nb$_{1-x}$Se$_2$ at atomic scale, providing a potential way to study the local Eliashberg function and phonon spectra of the related transition-metal dichalcogenides.