Investigation of transient heat current from first principles using complex absorbing potential

Abstract

We report on a first-principles investigation of transient heat current through molecular devices under steplike pulse of external and gate voltages. Using the nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) approach, an exact solution of transient heat current is obtained that goes beyond the wide-band limit. Combining with density-functional theory (DFT), we propose a time-dependent NEGF-DFT formalism to study the transient heat current under a steplike pulse for molecular devices from first principles. Anticipating the huge computational cost in the transient regime, we develop an algorithm to speed up the calculation using the complex absorbing potential (CAP). By adding the CAP to replace the Hamiltonian of leads, the effective self-energy of the Green's function becomes independent of energy, allowing analytic calculation of the triple integrations in the exact solution of transient heat current using the theorem of residue. With this linear scaling algorithm, the computational complexity is greatly reduced, and a first-principles calculation of transient heat current of molecular devices becomes possible. As an example, we apply our NEGF-DFT-CAP formalism for a molecular device, the Di-thiol benzene molecule connected by two semi-infinite aluminum leads, and we calculate the transient heat current under an upward gate voltage pulse. The enhancement of heat current is observed.