A generalized quantum chemical approach for nano- and bio-electronics

A generalized quantum chemical approach for electron transport in molecular devices is developed. It allows to treat the devices where the metal electrodes and the molecule are either chemically or physically bonded on equal footing. Effects of molecular length and hydrogen bonding on the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of molecular devices are discussed. An extension to include the vibration motions of the molecule has been derived and implemented. It provides the inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) of molecular devices with unprecedented accuracy, and reveals important information about the molecular structures that are not accessible in the experiment. The IETS is shown to be a powerful characterization tool for molecular devices. An effective elongation method has been developed to study the electron transport in nanoand bio-electronic devices at hybrid density functional theory level. It enables to study electronic structures and transportation properties of a 40 nm long self-assembled conjugated polymer junction, a 21 nm long single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT), and a 60 basepairs DNA molecule. It is the first time that systems consisting of more than 10,000 electrons have been described at such a sophisticated level. The calculations have shown that the electron transport in sub-22 nm long SWCNT and short DNA molecules is dominated by the coherent scattering through the delocalized unoccupied states. The derived length dependence of coherent electron transport in these nanostructured systems will be useful for the future experiments. Moreover, some unexpected behaviors of these devices have been discovered.QC 2010120