title: The information content of electron flow through adsorbed molecular monolayers.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Rd, Evanston, Illinois 60208-3113, USA. p-sherratt@northwestern.edu
authors.forename: Paul A J
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Sherratt
authors.forename: Hagai
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Cohen
authors.forename: Tamar
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Seideman
mesh_terms: D000327:Adsorption; D004583:Electrons; D008567:Membranes, Artificial; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D055672:Static Electricity
chemical_list: D008567:Membranes, Artificial