Luttinger liquid and polaronic effects in electron transport through a molecular transistor

TL;DR

This paper investigates electron transport in a molecular transistor with Luttinger liquid leads, revealing how interactions influence conductance resonances and vibron-assisted tunneling, with distinct behaviors in weak and strong interaction regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a master equation approach to analyze how Luttinger liquid interactions affect electron transport and conductance features in molecular transistors.

Findings

Resonant-like conductance behavior in weak/moderate interactions

Vibron-assisted tunneling can dominate transport

Strong interactions suppress resonances and induce power-law scaling

Abstract

Electron transport through a single-level quantum dot weakly coupled to Luttinger liquid leads is considered in the master equation approach. It is shown that for a weak or moderately strong interaction the differential conductance demonstrates resonant-like behavior as a function of bias and gate voltages. The inelastic channels associated with vibron-assisted electron tunnelling can even dominate electron transport for a certain region of interaction strength. In the limit of strong interaction resonant behavior disappears and the differential conductance scales as a power low on temperature (linear regime) or on bias voltage (nonlinear regime).