The information content of electron flow through adsorbed molecular monolayers.
We point to the ability of noncontact measurements of electron transport via self-assembled monolayers to provide chemical, A-resolved information about the underlying molecule. A conceptual framework is presented to model a current flow of soft electrons through a molecular monolayer to a substrate and explore the information content of this and other emerging noncontact measurements. A numerical scheme is developed where advantage is taken of the split-operator formalism to propagate the incident electronic wave function over a suitable periodic potential energy surface representing the self-assembled monolayer. The (experimentally observable) potential difference introduced by the transmitted electrons is extracted from the time-averaged electron density using the Poisson equation of classical electrostatics.
Sherratt
Paul A J
PA
Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, Illinois 60208-3113, USA. p-sherratt@northwestern.edu
Cohen
Hagai
H
Seideman
Tamar
T
D000327:Adsorption; D004583:Electrons; D008567:Membranes, Artificial; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D055672:Static Electricity
D008567:Membranes, Artificial