2023/11/08 by Fei Wen, Wen, Fei, Guohui Dong +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Surface Chemistry and Catalysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.04543
openalex publication_date 2023/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The scanning tunneling microscopy induced luminescence (STML) can be used to probe the optical and electronic properties of molecules. Concerning the vibronic coupling, we model the molecule as a two-level system with the vibrational degrees of freedom. Based on the Bardeen's theory, we express the inelastic tunneling current in terms of Huang-Rhys factor within the inelastic electron scattering (IES) mechanism. We find that the differential conductance, varying with the bias voltage, exhibits distinct step structure with various vibronic coupling strength. The second derivative of the inelastic tunneling current with respect to the bias voltage shows the characteristics of vibrational-level structure with Franck-Condon factor. Consequently, we propose a method to determine the Huang-Rhys factor of molecules, holding promising potential within the realm of solid-state physics.