Nonadiabatic Van der Pol oscillations in molecular transport

Alexey Kartsev, Claudio Verdozzi () and Gianluca Stefanucci

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2014, vol. 87, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: The force exerted by the electrons on the nuclei of a current-carrying molecular junction can be manipulated to engineer nanoscale mechanical systems. In the adiabatic regime a peculiarity of these forces is negative friction, responsible for Van der Pol oscillations of the nuclear coordinates. In this work we study the robustness of the Van der Pol oscillations against high-frequency sources. For this purpose we go beyond the adiabatic approximation and perform full Ehrenfest dynamics simulations. The numerical scheme implements a mixed quantum-classical algorithm for open systems and is capable to deal with arbitrary time-dependent driving fields. We find that the Van der Pol oscillations are extremely stable. The nonadiabatic electron dynamics distorts the trajectory in the momentum-coordinate phase space but preserves the limit cycles in an average sense. We further show that high-frequency fields change both the oscillation amplitudes and the average nuclear positions. By switching the fields off at different times one obtains cycles of different amplitudes which attain the limit cycle only after considerably long times. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Mesoscopic and Nanoscale Systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40905-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:87:y:2014:i:1:p:1-12:10.1140/epjb/e2013-40905-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2013-40905-5

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().