0000000000624740
AUTHOR
Petri Myöhänen
Kadanoff-Baym approach to quantum transport through interacting nanoscale systems: from the transient to the steady-state regime
We propose a time-dependent many-body approach to study the short-time dynamics of correlated electrons in quantum transport through nanoscale systems contacted to metallic leads. This approach is based on the time-propagation of the Kadanoff-Baym equations for the nonequilibrium many-body Green's function of open and interacting systems out of equilibrium. An important feature of the method is that it takes full account of electronic correlations and embedding effects in the presence of time-dependent external fields, while at the same time satisfying the charge conservation law. The method further extends the Meir-Wingreen formula to the time domain for initially correlated states. We stu…
Many-particle theory for time-dependent quantum transport in nanostructures
During the recent decades, molecular electronics has established its place as one of the promising fields in the nanoscience. The possibility to manufacture and control molecular junctions where single molecules are squeezed between the conducing electrodes has opened up new possibilities to develop nanoscale devices which could be employed as building blocks for future nanoelectronic applications. The driving force for this new branch of physics has been the experimental advances but also theoretical methods have been under intensive study and many theoretical tools have been developed to understand the electron transport processes in the nanoscale systems. This thesis focuses on developin…
Kadanoff-Baym approach to time-dependent quantum transport in AC and DC fields
We have developed a method based on the embedded Kadanoff-Baym equations to study the time evolution of open and inhomogeneous systems. The equation of motion for the Green's function on the Keldysh contour is solved using different conserving many-body approximations for the self-energy. Our formulation incorporates basic conservation laws, such as particle conservation, and includes both initial correlations and initial embedding effects, without restrictions on the time-dependence of the external driving field. We present results for the time-dependent density, current and dipole moment for a correlated tight binding chain connected to one-dimensional non-interacting leads exposed to DC …
Image charge dynamics in time-dependent quantum transport
In this work we investigate the effects of the electron-electron interaction between a molecular junction and the metallic leads in time-dependent quantum transport. We employ the recently developed embedded Kadanoff-Baym method [Phys. Rev. B 80, 115107 (2009)] and show that the molecule-lead interaction changes substantially the transient and steady-state transport properties. We first show that the mean-field Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation does not capture the polarization effects responsible for the renormalization of the molecular levels neither in nor out of equilibrium. Furthermore, due to the time-local nature of the HF self-energy there exists a region in parameter space for which …