2009/02/18 by Benjamin Schmidt, Benjamin B. Schmidt, Matthias H. Hettler +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Biasing #Charge (physics) #Charge carrier #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Condensed matter physics #Coupling (piping) #DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry #Diagrammatic reasoning #Electron #Materials science #Molecular Junctions and Nanostructures #Molecular physics #Molecule #Organic Electronics and Photovoltaics #Physics #Polaron #Quantum mechanics #Voltage #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.82.155113
13 pages, 10 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B
arxiv created 2009/02/18 · openalex publication_date 2010/10/07 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In many organic molecules, the strong coupling of excess charges to vibrational modes leads to the formation of polarons, i.e., localized states of charge carriers and molecular deformations. At room temperature, incoherent hopping of polarons along the molecule is the dominant mechanism of charge transport. We study the situation far-from-equilibrium where, due to an applied voltage bias, the induced number of charge carriers on the molecule is high and charge correlations become relevant. We develop a diagrammatic theory that accounts in a finite system for all many-particle correlations and their effect on the incoherent transport. We determine the I\text\ensuremath-V characteristics of short sequences of DNA by expanding the diagrammatic theory up to second order in the hopping parameters. Correlations qualitatively modify the results as compared to those obtained in a mean-field approximation.