Professor of Physics
Molecular
electronics terms a relatively new field in nanoscience, which features
individual molecules as constituting elements of electronic devices.
These microscopic devices have the same input/output characteristics as
conventional mesoscopic diodes or transistors. Experimentally, they can
be realized in break-junction measurements or with the help of Scanning
Tunneling Microscopes. From the theoretical side, charge flow through
single molecules is a genuine quantum mechanical problem and is usually
studied within the formalism of non-equilibrium Greens-Function
methodology. We are interested in the effects of electron-electron,
electron-photon, and electron-phonon interactions on the transport
properties. Within the framework of a DFG Special Research Program we
went beyond the heavily used static DFT approaches and employ many body
perturbation theory at the GW level as well as time dependent DFT. The
goal is to improve the quantitative description of currents as well as
new phenomena related to photo-induced processes in these nano
junctions. A very recent interest is related to
thermoelectric properties of nanomaterials, where we employ
non-equilibrium MD and Boltzmann transport approaches.