Vibrational inelastic scattering effects in molecular electronics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multichannel scattering method to analyze how vibrational modes affect electron transport in molecular junctions, providing a tool for realistic system calculations and comparison with experimental data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multichannel scattering approach for vibrational effects in molecular electronics, linking it to existing methods and demonstrating its application to experimental conductance data.

Findings

Effective calculation of vibrational effects on electron transport.

Application to recent molecular junction experiments.

Comparison with other theoretical approaches.

Abstract

We describe how to treat the interaction of travelling electrons with localised vibrational modes in nanojunctions. We present a multichannel scattering technique which can be applied to calculate the transport properties for realistic systems, and show how it is related to other methods that are useful in particular cases. We apply our technique to describe recent experiments on the conductance through molecular junctions.