Transmission of Double-Impurity Atomic Switches

Z. L. Miskovic, R. A. English, S. G. Davison, and F. O. Goodman

Department of Applied Mathematics
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada
N2L 3G1

Abstract:

The electron transmission properties of a molecular-electronic switch, represented by a monatomic chain with two atomic impurities, is studied via the tight-binding model. A method, based on the Lippmann-Schwinger equation, is used to obtain simple expressions for the transmission probability. Impurities, occupying neighboring sites in the chain, interact directly and act as a single diatomic impurity. For remote impurities, there is no direct interaction in tight-binding model, but interference among the multiply-reflected Bloch waves between the impurities leads to oscillations in the transmission probability over the energy band. We find that, in either case, controlling the transmission by the impurity-site energies is feasible in the regime of sufficiently weak impurity-chain couplings.

last updated Sat Oct 20 00:46 EDT 2001 by RAE