Invariance of molecular charge transport upon changes of extended molecule size and several related issues

Abstract

As a sanity test for the theoretical method employed, studies on (steady-state) charge transport through molecular devices usually confine themselves to check whether the method in question satisfies the charge conservation. Another important test of the theory’s correctness is to check that the computed current does not depend on the choice of the central region (also referred to as the “extended molecule”). This work addresses this issue and demonstrates that the relevant transport and transport-related properties are indeed invariant upon changing the size of the extended molecule, when the embedded molecule can be described within a general single-particle picture (namely, a second-quantized Hamiltonian bilinear in the creation and annihilation operators). It is also demonstrates that the invariance of nonequilibrium properties is exhibited by the exact results but not by those computed approximately within ubiquitous wide- and flat-band limits (WBL and FBL, respectively). To exemplify the limitations of the latter, the phenomenon of negative differential resistance (NDR) is considered. It is shown that the exactly computed current may exhibit a substantial NDR, while the NDR effect is absent or drastically suppressed within the WBL and FBL approximations. The analysis done in conjunction with the WBLs and FBLs reveals why general studies on nonequilibrium properties require a more elaborate theoretical than studies on linear response properties (e.g., ohmic conductance and thermopower) at zero temperature. Furthermore, examples are presented that demonstrate that treating parts of electrodes adjacent to the embedded molecule and the remaining semi-infinite electrodes at different levels of theory (which is exactly what most NEGF-DFT approaches do) is a procedure that yields spurious structures in nonlinear ranges of current–voltage curves.