Over the past several decades, semiconductor electronic devices have been miniaturized following the remarkable "Moores law". If this trend is to continue, devices will reach physical size limit in the not too distance future. There is therefore an urgent need to understand the physics of electronic devices at nano-meter scale, and to predict how such nanoelectronics will work. In nanoelectronics theory, one of the most important and difficult problems concerns electron-phonon interactions under nonequilibrium transport conditions. Calculating phonon spectrum, electron-phonon interaction, and their effects to charge transport for nanoelectronic devices including all atomic microscopic details, is a very difficult and unsolved problem. It is the purpose of this thesis to develop a theoretical formalism and associated numerical tools for solving this problem. / In our formalism, we calculate electronic Hamiltonian via density functional theory (DFT) within the nonequilibrium Green's functions (NEGF) which takes care of nonequilibrium transport conditions and open device boundaries for the devices. From the total energy of the device scattering region, we derive the dynamic matrix in analytical form within DFT-NEGF and it gives the vibrational spectrum of the relevant atoms. The vibrational spectrum together with the vibrational eigenvector gives the electron-phonon coupling strength at nonequilibrium for various scattering states. A self-consistent Born approximation (SCBA) allows one to determine the phonon self-energy, the electron Green's function, the electronic density matrix and the electronic Hamiltonian, all self-consistently within equal footing. The main technical development of this work is the DFT-NEGF-SCBA formalism and its associated codes. / A number of important physics issues are studied in this work. We start with a detailed analysis of transport properties of C60 molecular tunnel junction. We find that charge transport is mediated by resonances due to an alignment of the Fermi level of the electrodes and the lowest unoccupied C60 molecular orbital. We then make a first step toward the problem of analyzing phonon modes of the C60 by examining the rotational and the center-of-mass motions by calculating the total energy. We obtain the characteristic frequencies of the libration and the center-of-mass modes, the latter is quantitatively consistent with recent experimental measurements. Next, we developed a DFT-NEGF theory for the general purpose of calculating any vibrational modes in molecular tunnel junctions. We derive an analytical expression for dynamic matrix within the framework of DFT-NEGF. Diagonalizing the dynamic matrix we obtain the vibrational (phonon) spectrum of the device. Using this technique we calculate the vibrational spectrum of benzenedithiolate molecule in a tunnel junction and we investigate electron-phonon coupling under an applied bias voltage during current flow. We find that the electron-phonon coupling strength for this molecular device changes drastically as the bias voltage increases, due to dominant contributions from the center-of-mass vibrational modes of the molecule. Finally, we have investigated the reverse problem, namely the effect of molecular vibrations on the tunneling current. For this purpose we developed the DFT-NEGF-SCBA formalism, and an example is given illustrating the power of this formalism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.102171 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Sergueev, Nikolai. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Physics.) |
| Rights | © Nikolai Sergueev, 2005 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002479945, proquestno: AAINR25252, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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