An elongation method for first principle simulations of electronic structures and electron transport properties of finite nanostructures

Abstract

An effective elongation method has been developed to study electronic structures and electron transport properties of nanoelectronic and bioelectronic devices at a hybrid density functional theory level. It enables to treat finite nanostructures consisting of as many as 28 000 electrons and has been successfully applied to sub-120-nm-long conjugated polymers, sub-60-nm-long single-walled carbon nanotubes, and 30 base-pair DNA molecules. The calculated current-voltage characteristics of different systems are found to be in good agreement with the experiments. Some unexpected behaviors of these nanosized devices have been discovered.