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Vibrational Heating in Single-Molecule Switches

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Architecture and Design of Molecule Logic Gates and Atom Circuits

Part of the book series: Advances in Atom and Single Molecule Machines ((AASMM))

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Abstract

It has been recently shown experimentally that the switching rate in single-molecule junctions sensitively depends on the applied bias voltage. Using a minimal model which describes the barrier crossing problem by multiple excitations of vibrations of the molecular junction and by taking into account the molecule specific nonconstant density of states, we are able to describe the complex, non-monotonic behavior of the switching process.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the German Priority Program “Quantum transport at the molecular scale (SPP1243).” We acknowledge collaboration with Olga A. Neucheva, Christian Weiss, Ruslan Temirov, and Stefan Tautz for experiments which strongly inspired the formulation of the model that is reviewed in this chapter. Furthermore, we acknowledge a close collaboration with Andreas Greuling, Marcin Kaczmarski, and Michael Rohlfing on the ab initio calculations of the potential energy surfaces for the switching observed in the aforementioned experiments. We would like to thank Cormac Toher for fruitful discussions. We also thank the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at the Dresden University of Technology for computational resources. TB acknowledges Florian Pump and Cormac Toher for fruitful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Materials Science and Max Bergmann Center of Biomaterials, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Germany

    Thomas Brumme, Rafael Gutiérrez & Gianaurelio Cuniberti

Authors
  1. Thomas Brumme
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  2. Rafael Gutiérrez
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  3. Gianaurelio Cuniberti
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Correspondence to Thomas Brumme .

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  1. CIN2 (CSIC-ICN), Campus de la UAB, Bellaterra, 08193, Spain

    Nicolas Lorente

  2. , GNS, CNRS, Rue J. Marvig 29, Toulousse Cedex, 31055, France

    Christian Joachim

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Brumme, T., Gutiérrez, R., Cuniberti, G. (2013). Vibrational Heating in Single-Molecule Switches. In: Lorente, N., Joachim, C. (eds) Architecture and Design of Molecule Logic Gates and Atom Circuits. Advances in Atom and Single Molecule Machines. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33137-4_7

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