Resistive and rectifying effects of pulling gold atoms at thiol-gold nano-contacts

We present results of electronic structure calculations for well-relaxed Au/benzene-1,4-dithiol/Au molecular contacts, based on density functional theory and the generalized gradient approximation. Electronic states in the vicinity of the Fermi energy are mainly of Au 5d and S 3p symmetry, whereas contributions of C 2p states are very small. Hybridization between C 2p orbitals within the benzene substructure is strongly suppressed due to S-C bonding. In agreement with experim...

We present a novel ab initio non-equilibrium approach to calculate the current across a molecular junction. The method rests on a wave function based full ab initio description of the central region of the junction combined with a tight binding approximation for the electrodes in the frame of the Keldysh Green's function formalism. Our procedure is demonstrated for a dithiolethine molecule between silver electrodes. The main conducting channel is identified and the full curre...

We report first-principles calculations of the inelastic current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of a gold point contact and a molecular junction in the nonresonant regime. Discontinuities in the I-V curves appear in correspondence to the normal modes of the structures. Due to the quasi-one-dimensional nature of these systems, specific modes with large longitudinal component dominate the inelastic I-V curves. In the case of the gold point contact, our results are in good agreem...

We examine theoretically the effects of the bonding geometries at the gold-thiol interfaces on the inelastic tunneling spectra of propanedithiolate (PDT) molecules bridging gold electrodes and show that inelastic tunneling spectroscopy combined with theory can be used to determine these bonding geometries experimentally. With the help of density functional theory, we calculate the relaxed geometries and vibrational modes of extended molecules each consisting of one or two PDT...

All density functional calculations of single-molecule transport to date have used continuous exchange-correlation approximations. The lack of derivative discontinuity in such calculations leads to the erroneous prediction of metallic transport for insulating molecules. A simple and computationally undemanding atomic self-interaction correction greatly improves the agreement with experiment for the prototype Au/dithiolated-benzene/Au junction.

We investigate the origin of asymmetry in various measured current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of molecules with no inherent spatial asymmetry, with particular focus on a recent break junction measurement. We argue that such asymmetry arises due to unequal coupling with the contacts and a consequent difference in charging effects, which can only be captured in a self-consistent model for molecular conduction. The direction of the asymmetry depends on the sign of the majorit...

We investigate the effect on molecular transport due to the different structural aspects of metal-molecule interfaces. The example system chosen is the prototypical molecular device formed by sandwiching the phenyl dithiolate molecule (PDT) between two gold electrodes with different metal-molecule distance, atomic structure at the metallic surface, molecular adsorption geometry and with an additional hydrogen end atom. We find the dependence of the conductance on the metal-mo...

We address the microscopic origin of the current-induced forces by analyzing results of first principles density functional calculations of atomic gold wires connected to two gold electrodes with different electrochemical potentials. We find that current induced forces are closely related to the chemical bonding, and arise from the rearrangement of bond charge due to the current flow. We explain the current induced bond weakening/strengthening by introducing bond charges deco...

We present an ab-initio method to simulate the current noise in the presence of electron-vibration interactions in atomic and molecular junctions at finite temperature. Using a combination of nonequilibrium Keldysh Green's function techniques and density functional theory, we study the elastic and inelastic contributions to electron current and shot noise within a wide range of transmission values in systems exhibiting multiple electronic levels and vibrational modes. Within ...

Based on the matrix Green's function method combined with hybrid tight-binding / density functional theory, we calculate the conductances of a series of gold-dithiol molecule-gold junctions including benzenedithiol (BDT), benzenedimethanethiol (BDMT), hexanedithiol (HDT), octanedithiol (ODT) and decanedithiol (DDT). An atomically-contacted extended molecule model is used in our calculation. As an important procedure, we determine the position of the Fermi level by the energy ...