Quantum transport through single and multilayer icosahedral fullerenes

TL;DR

This study investigates quantum electron transport in single and multilayer icosahedral fullerenes using tight-binding and Green functions, revealing how symmetry, layer interactions, and misalignment affect transmission properties.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed model for multilayer icosahedral fullerenes considering curvature, size, and intershell interactions, and analyzes how symmetry breaking influences quantum transmission.

Findings

Symmetry axis misalignment breaks degeneracies and creates narrow bands.

Transmission varies rapidly with Fermi energy in non-symmetrical onions.

Outer shell electronic structure predominantly determines transmission features.

Abstract

We use a tight-binding Hamiltonian and Green functions methods to calculate the quantum transmission through single-wall fullerenes and bilayered and trilayered onions of icosahedral symmetry attached to metallic leads. The electronic structure of the onion-like fullerenes takes into account the curvature and finite size of the fullerenes layers as well as the strength of the intershell interactions depending on to the number of interacting atom pairs belonging to adjacent shells. Misalignment of the symmetry axes of the concentric icosahedral shells produces breaking of the level degeneracies of the individual shells, giving rise some narrow quasi-continuum bands instead of the localized discrete peaks of the individual fullerenes. As a result, the transmission function for non symmetrical onions are rapidly varying functions of the Fermi energy. Furthermore, we found that most of the features of the transmission through the onions are due to the electronic structure of the outer shell with additional Fano-like antiresonances arising from coupling with or between the inner shells.