Electron Transfer Property of Nanojunctions and Spectroscopy

• Research teams involved: U. Harbola, Department of Inorganic & Physical Chemsitry; S. Ramasesha, D D Sarma, Solid State & Structural Unit; Prabal K Maiti, Department of Physics.

With the advancement in technology, it now seems feasible to fabricate small electronic components whose typical dimensions may vary from few microns to several hundred nanometers and are generally referred as mesoscopic systems or simply quantum systems (QS). Electron transport properties of these systems are drastically different in many respects from their macroscopic (classical) counterparts. Transport through a QS may occur coherently or incoherently depending on its size and the energy of the tunneling electron (which is usually controlled by an external bias). The quantum effects and many-body interactions such as electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions can strongly influence the electron transfer process through a QS, which is yet to be understood completely. Understanding a quantitative role of many-body effects on the conductance of nanojunctions is one of the grand challenges in modern science. Despite various theoretical efforts that have been devoted to study electron transport in nanojunctions, a complete and coherent picture is still lacking. We propose to extend present theoretical tools and develop new methods to study many-body effects on electron transport in quantum junctions and apply these methods to gain insight into other interesting fields of nanoscience, such as solar energy harvesting and electroluminescence in nanojunctions.