Band structure effects in molecular wires
- Short molecular chains can serve as wires. You can find a fair example in our recent paper published in Nature Materials.
- Just like ordinary wires, molecular wires can be insulators or conductors.
- But there’s more than that! In the length dependence of their excitation gaps, incommensurate oscillations can appear.
- Read more in our paper in Nature Communications: “Signature of the Dirac cone in the properties of linear oligoacenes”
Spin-fluctuations and quantum transport at nanoscale
- nanowires, molecules and even single atoms are a realization of low-dimensional quantum junctions
- naturally, the electric current can be thought to be a consequence of charge fluctuations.
- The fluctuations of electron’s spin come into play, when there is a spot in the junction where the Coulomb repulsion between electrons becomes very strong.
- As an example, read about a switchable Kondo resonance in copper phthalocyanine in Physical Review Letters
Molecular spin torques
Recently, we have started a theoretical investigation of spin torques in molecular magnets. Stay tuned!