Electronic transmission of three-terminal pyrene molecular bridge

This paper investigates theoretically the electronic transmission spectra of the three terminal pyrene molecular bridge and the quantum current distribution on each bond by the tight-binding model based on nonequilibrium Green’s function and the quantum current density approach, in which one π molecular orbital is taken into account per carbon atom when the energy levels and HOMO-LUMO gap are obtained. The transmission spectra show that the electronic transmission of the three terminal pyrene molecular bridge depends obviously on the incident electronic energy and the pyrene eigenenergy. The symmetrical and oscillation properties of the transmission spectra are illustrated. A novel plus-minus energy switching function is found. The quantum current distribution shows that the loop currents inside the pyrene are induced, and some bond currents are much larger than the input and the output currents. The reasons why the loop currents and the larger bond currents are induced are the phase difference of the atomic orbits and the degeneracy of the molecular orbits. The calculations illustrate that the quantum current distributions are in good agreement with Kirchhoff quantum current conservation law.